Tag: group transcription

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final blog

Olivia Smith- Final Project

After working closely with my group members (Sam Salazar, Brendan Matthys, and Ethan Conklin) and familiarizing ourselves with the resources used throughout the semester, our final project seemed less overwhelming than I had originally anticipated. Essentially, this project consisted of a collective form of all the “mini” projects and assignments that we had already done for The Humanities Now! class. We were just giving them a home when we uploaded them onto the WordPress site.

I had worked with the WordPress platform in a previous class last year and already knew some basics about operating and designing my own website. Though Brendan did most of the changes on the website, my fellow group members and I were assisting him in what we thought best suited our project. Brendan became the leader of this group very quickly and began delegating different tasks to each member and offered assistance when we needed it. This was very effective for the members of our group because it really pushed us to get the work done. I know that the members of my group and I are very proud with the way that our website has turned out. Additionally, I think that creating a website for the research that we did on the Bethlehem Memoirs was the best way to fully display our hard work from the semester.

We wanted to make the central focus of our site our research question: “Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian people according to our memoir? If so, how does it play into their lives?” We did this by keeping the question centered on the home page so that our viewers could reference it at any point. Also, located on the home page is a simple explanation of the purpose of our site and the various technologies that we have used to answer this question.

After we transcribed every memoir, we uploaded them onto the “Oxygen” platform that Dr. Jakacki taught us how to use. From there, we were able to tag people’s names, place names, emotions, events, and health. After that, we extracted the entities that were important in answering our research question. We chose to compare emotions to place names to analyze how the Moravian people viewed their congregations. The entities were uploaded onto a “Google Fusion” table which you can view in the Tag Frequencies tab on the website.

One of my favorite parts about this website is how interactive it is. The Timeline, Storymap.Js, and Voyant tabs provide information about our research while also requiring the viewer of the site to follow along and explore each platform. Because the Bethlehem Memoirs consisted of multiple people, our timeline project was very unique. We had a stacked timeline that so that the viewer could see the events that occurred during this time period according to each person from the memoir. Grafton wrote about this in his introduction by saying “by comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work”(Grafton, pg. 15).

I think the most important tab located on our website would have to be the Storymap.js tab. You can explore a story map for any one of the four major memoirs that we transcribed. Because there were numerous people in the Bethlehem memoirs, each member from our group had focused on one particular person from the memoir throughout the semester. On this tab, you can select one of those people and it will take you to their storymap. This was essential for our website because it displayed how far each person traveled by pinpointing places that they mentioned in their memoirs. This visualization of mapping that we used was principal to the project because it took every point and created a visual that allowed the viewer to analyze the distance that was travelled.Adding to that point, Drucker wrote, “…however we classify the visualization that we use, they all require the same analytic approach to expose the working of their graphical organization as meaning-producing” (Drucker, pg. 66). My memoir, Rosine Tanneberger, was kind of different from the others because her journey was short. She only traveled from her birth place of Mankendorf, Moravia to Gnadenfrei, Germany.

Lastly, we chose to use Voyant. This was the first platform that we explored for this class and we felt that it would be pretty necessary to include it in this project. Similarly to our entities, it extracts words from the memoirs and puts it into a distinct visualization, but using Voyant we were able to analyze it through all of our memoirs collectively. This platform is pretty cool to play around with because there are so many different options to create your own visualization of the words. We only included the a few that we felt represented our memoir best. These included Cirrus, TermsBerry, Textual Arc, and Links. My favorite visualization comes from the Cirrus tool because it creates a clear depiction of the visualization that emphasizes the most frequently used words. The biggest words are used the most across all memoirs, while the smaller words are used less. “Heart”, “Dear”, and “Congregation” are just few of the many words, but they are seen as the largest words using this tool.

Overall, I think that my group members and I are very proud of the work that we have put into this project and website. The most important part of this whole project is that we got to explore the lives of Moravian people through analyzing their work. We had fun creating this website together and even added a special tab that includes Moravian Music which you can listen to while exploring the site. Even though there was a lot that was involved in creating this project, it made the semester fly by and I’m really going to miss working with Ethan, Brendan, and Sam as well as these memoirs. I hope you enjoy our website just as much as I do!

http://bethlehemhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

 

P.S. Thank you for a great semester!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blog #4

Blog #4

As I started to mark up my transcription, I started to really put together how everything was interconnected.  At first I was simply reading a memoir and it felt like anything else I would read but marking up the transcription and highlighting people, places, and things like emotions made my connection with the transcription deeper.  When reading something casually, it’s easy to miss emotions, and especially when reading something personal like a memoir these emotions are very important. Emotions allow us to see what the writer was going through and can really put us in the place where he/she was when writing the memoir.  When really looking at the places, it’s really interesting to see where the people in these memoirs lived and traveled to. We can see these areas today especially places like London, but can only imagine what it would be like for them at that time. Lastly, highlighting each person and their connection to John Willey allowed us to see how many people John had affected through his life and work.  These markups have helped me understand these transcriptions on a deeper level and connect to them.

Our memoir in particular had three people working on it at the same time.  This meant in order for us to have consistent mark ups we needed to collaborate and decide what was worthy and what was not.  One of the main challenges that I think was prominent in other memoirs as well was terms like Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, Savior, Saviour, and Lord.  Our group decided to make Jesus the person’s name, and the rest all role names. This is seen in one of the screenshots below where I have “Lord” marked up as a role name.  In some cases it was harder for my group to come up with what to do about emotions. We decided that including emotions that was not felt by a particular person would not be marked up.  For example, in the pictures below we can see I marked up emotions like dread and guilt, because that is what John Willey was feeling. I agree with Elena Pierazzo when she talks about how uploading a document on the web requires much more and different things compared to a published document.  This is because editors need to do much more like markups and what exactly they need to include and exclude. I also agree with her that there is so much more that one can do with a computer compared to a published document. Coding allows us to mark emotions, places, people, dates, and much more up in order to organize information that would not be available on the computer.  

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Blog #4

In her article A rationale of digital documentary editions, Elena Pierazzo, a revered worker at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College in London, reflects upon the question: are digital editions different from printed ones? At first glance to a citizen who has never worked in the fields of digital humanities, digital mediums seem to present the materials in the same manner as printed texts. However, Pierazza adamantly argues that “editions as we know them from print culture are substantially different from the ones we find in a digital medium” (Pierazza).

 

A first major factor to consider is the price of publication. “In a digital environment, the cost of publication (though not necessarily that of production) has been remarkably reduced and therefore an increasing number of such editions are now being published on the web” (Pierazza). Consider the efficiency of publishing digitally. Once the product has an online URL, the reader can paste this URL and find the desired edition through Google in the blink of an eye. A person does not need paper or ink for an edition that can be printed through the internet.

 

“The concept of transcription largely consists in a systematic program of selective alteration coupled with selective preservation of information” (Pierazza). Pierazza’s article discusses Michael Sperberg-McQueens’s declaration that there is an infinite set of facts related to any work being edited. This statement brings up a traditional argument regarding the pros and cons of graphical analysis and standard literature. Reading texts directly from an article encourages the phenomenon of close reading. The reader is forced to pay closer attention to the minute details mentioned by the writer. However, when texts become long and concepts become more sophisticated, the sheer amount of intricate details detract from the overall point of the text. The read thus experiences a bottleneck effect; the human brain can only process a finite amount of information within a given moment. For this reason, digital editions offer a better alternative to print culture. Digital editions allow an editor to select what relevant context needs to be altered and what information is arbitrary. Although Pierazza claims how digital editions are superior, she never claimed that this process of editing was easy.

 

We have been using TEI-compliant XML markup to edit our transcriptions as a collaborative group effort. Our group specifically worked on our previous transcription of Esther Latrobe’s memoir. The way the software that we used worked was based on a tagging system. You would highlight the desired word or phrase that you wanted to tag and then categorize it from the following list: person, place, organization, date, emotion, event, health, or object

 

 

The picture above displays how the program compiles a list of every tag in a convenient and organized manner. This organization adheres kindly to the brain’s tendency to recognize patterns. Personally, the list of tags related our transcription back to Latrobe’s main theme of religion. Our most common tag was a person. Since God was the most important “person” in Latrobe’s life, our group decided to make any mention of the lord considered to be a tag as a person. The sheer amount of “persons” we tagged shows Latrobe’s intimate connection with God. However, the process of tagging this document proved harder than expected.

 

Although our group was filled with brilliant people, not all brilliant minds can think alike. By this statement, I mean that we had to write down laws specifying what were the qualifications that determined each tag. 

 

 

Even though the picture above is unfortunately blurry, it reflected upon a problem within tagging that my group encountered. Due to the fact that Latrobe lived in a family of six children, her memoir uses the word “brother” a lot. However, some of the times the word “brother” would be capitalized. We tagged the “brother”s that were capitalized and did not tag the ones that were not. In this decision, we made any proper nouns considered to be a person.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

I had the opportunity to transcribe quite a few documents within the Moravian Lives project, which I had never done before. At first, I was reluctant to begin reading old cursive handwriting, but once I began the assignment my opinion quickly changed. Through this assignment I was able to read and transcribe the works of Henry Unger, Rosine Tanneberger, and Anna Elizabeth Rauch.

Some of these readings were very difficult to understand, due to the many grammatical mistakes and illegible handwriting, but I enjoyed working through it. Every time that I was able to transcribe a word that gave me difficulty, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied. Once I had all of my documents typed, I then read them over and found myself very interested in what the original authors had written. It really helped my understanding of what the author was trying to convey by reading the documents when they were typed out and “uncoded” in some instances. It was very helpful working in a group for this project because when one of us was troubled by a word or phrase we could work through it together. It made the process easier and more enjoyable.

In the Henry Unger document, I was able to read a brief account of the life and faith of Ober Peyle from 1721 to 1750. It was a little confusing to understand, but I believe that Henry Unger was speaking about him as a sinner who was forgiven and joined his congregation. In the second document I transcribed, I learned about the life Rosine Tanneberger and her journey to find rest for her “soul.” Lastly, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Brendan on the Anna Elizabeth Rauch document. We both found this document to be very hard to understand, but concluded that it was an account of her journey from Jamaica to Mesopotamia.

 

Henry Unger pg. 1

Rosine Tannerberger

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg.6

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 7

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 8

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 9

 

Google Doc