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Assignment #1

I found transcribing these pieces of work to be a very fascinating process. I have never completed a project like this before. I think that this project has given us an incredible opportunity. We have been given the chance to create digital artifacts from real journal entries. I found this project to be very special and meaningful. I really enjoyed reading the journal entries and being able to read them felt very personal. I imagined how long ago these were written and by who. There is something very personal about interpreting someone’s journal entries, especially for the first time. There were many deep emotions that were touched on in the texts which made me feel a connection to the work.

It was great to learn about these people of the Moravian church through their writing. From their writings, they seem to be very religious. It is unbelievable to think about the circumstances under which these entries were written and how different people’s lives are today. Reading these texts and transcribing them was a very intriguing process. It was quite difficult, yet allowed me to appreciate what I was doing even moreso. There were many words I was unable to read due to illegible handwriting and misspellings. Many of the words might’ve been spelled differently during this time period, but they also could’ve been due to human error. I completed the transcriptions through trying to decode words in my mind to the best of my ability. My group members and I often compared different words with each other to try to fully figure them out. It was helpful to get other perspectives on words from my group members. When I finally figured out a word which I was confused about, it was the most satisfying feeling. Completing these transcriptions almost felt as if I was completing a jigsaw puzzle.

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My works (4,9,11,12):

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000754

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000759

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000761

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000762

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Assignment #1

Assignment 1 – John Willey transcription

Link to transcription of the John Willey text (I transcribed pages 16-22):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOTUXh2VYeFLDoZfbqKbYCa9QtGikaS4gYO-hvPEmPg/edit

 

The text Rosemary, Jacob and I transcribed was a 19th century England memoir, written by John Willey. We transcribed 22 pages of text, written in cursive, to make the reading more accessible to future scholars. At first, I really struggled with identifying words and letters, leaving question marks on almost 40% of the words on my first page. However, as I went through the transcription process, I became more familiar with Willey’s handwriting. This allowed for me to pick out letters and words much more easily than before. For example, every time Willey wrote “in” he has the dot supposed to be above the “i” over the “n” off to the right. After reading through a lot of text, I eventually realized his writing styles and had a much easier time transcribing Willey’s text. Another issue I encountered was that some of the text was written very lightly, and parts of the image were blurry. However, this was promptly fixed by Professor Faull, by gathering a clearer version of the memoir from the archive. Professor Faull’s accessibility to that was very helpful, and showed me how well the digital humanities community is able to help each other out in completing transcriptions. Lastly, my classmates and professors were extremely helpful in transcribing some words that were unfamiliar to me. Transcribing Willey’s text allows me read it in a way more familiar to me, rather than struggling through reading his old, cursive handwriting.

Through reading Willey’s memoir and noticing frequently appearing words and themes, I was able to recognize the main points Willey portrays. Firstly, Willey speaks of an extremely religious and faithful man. He often speaks of Jesus, love, church and God. Willey describes God and Jesus as his saviour and speaks on how his connection to religion promoted a happy and loving life. Additionally, this man is suffering through a fatal disease throughout the text before passing away at the end. However, his faith allows for a positive outlook on the entire situation. This child of God, as described by Willey, was said to have a happy death. He was relieved from his suffering, and onto spend his after-life with God. Overall, Willey tells a tremendous story about the waning moments of the life of an honorable and faithful man.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1: Harriett Lees Transcription

I enjoyed this process of digital text creation because I liked the problem solving aspect that came with deciphering the words on the image. I liked uncovering and understanding the stories of the Moravians’ and learning about their lives. The transcription process itself was a bit challenging, especially at the beginning. It took me a while to get used to the handwriting and to figure out what was being said. The cursive made it particularly difficult at making out each letter in any given word. Also, because these documents were so old, there were ink drippings on the page, so it was hard to distinguish between ink drippings and dots that could be part of the the letters “i” or “j.” Another problem that I faced during the process of creating digital transcriptions was that because the artifacts are so old and that there is only one of them, they are stored in archives and we were unable to use the physical document to base our transcription off of. As a result, we had to use pictures of the archives which sometimes were blurry. However, we were able to get new images of the pages we could not read and were able to overcome this problem. The more reading I did, the better I got at it and I learned that printing the images and then figuring out the words was much easier for me. When I could not make out a word or a phrase, I would ask Paige, the professors in the class, and the research assistants who came in to help out. They were extremely helpful in deciphering the words I was unable to make out.

The memoir of Harriett Lees was written by her sibling. She died at age thirty in 1892 and was very sick with a bad cough and lung inflammation up until her death. Faith was something that was extremely important to her because she was brought up learning the principles of the Church of England. She often cited the Bible and was very moved by spirituality. Lees lost her brother which was extremely devastating to her. She would go to church often to talk with and pray to him and knew that they would soon be reunited. She was often sick and suffered from bad coughs and lung issues. She was married and had a son. Near her death, she lost her sister which was devastating to her and caused a lot of anxiety. She stuck with her faith, even until the end and helped those in need as much as she could.

s://docs.google.com/document/d/1sEJf1rOOI8QlH_7b7A_jvwiJSdMqXB2PzXwJ74NYOZ0/edit#

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Assignment #1

The understanding of how the transcription of a material document affects the researcher’s connection with that document. In my personal experience, transcribing the Moravian Lives piece in specifics the Samuel Tippet piece it was something that I had never done before. I have never completed a project similar to this one which is why I genuinely enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to me reading the work that the people of the Moravian Church had written. My group’s piece in particular was very religious and I’m assuming that this aspect was similar to a lot of the other groups’ works. I had never learned about these people before and it was intriguing to learn about them by reading their work and transcribing. It affects my understanding because it was almost like I was reading their journal or diary; it was a collection of their thoughts and at times it was super personal. There were also a few times because there were a few discrepancies within the text. Sometimes it was difficult to read and also there were misspellings. Perhaps this is how they spelled it at this certain time period, or just human error.

The process of digital text creation for my group started with dividing up who would transcribe what pages. After, we began to ‘decode’ in my mind. I would read the page and try to understand it best I could and later transcribe it. I would normally bold words I was unsure about or place a ‘?’ if I had no idea and check with my group partners after finishing the full page. I would tag people and places after I finished transcribing the page because I found it easier to do since the page told a little story and I started to pick up on words that were used often such as brother. I learned that this word needed to be tagged and was being used in a religious manner. After finishing all of my assigned pages, my group members double checked to make sure that all of our pages were both correctly transcribed and tagged. I felt that I had a connection to the documents because of how personal they were. For example, in some of the pages I transcribed the author spoke about their heart breaking and several emotions such as sadness and despair. I felt like I knew the character because of how deeply they were speaking and because I was rewriting their own words which no one had done before. The links to the original piece as well as my group’s transcribe piece are below.

 

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

Transcribed Works Main Link: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My Work: (Pgs. 7,8,10,15): http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000757

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000758

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000760

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000765