Tag: John Wiley

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Blog #2

Blog 2

For my first time transcribing a memoir, my group and I transcribes a memoir written by the kids of a man named John Wiley.  The memoir is written after the death John Wiley in order to remember in his life. It first starts off by introducing John Wiley and  his family stating that his mother died when he was very young, his father was a member in the congregation for 66 years, he had a brother that was also a member of multiple congregations, and then he also had his sister.  The memoir then describes his early life being a favorite of his teachers, but when moving to the city to start a career he also started to enjoy life and, “sinful pleasure” (3). Around the age of 15 he did not want anything to do with God.  He soon went to London and that is when he decided that he needed to change the way he was living and turn to God. He became a laborer at the Kingwood congregation and started to teach the children there. Shortly after being welcomed into the congregation as a laborer he had his first communion and was visited with a vision of Jesus Christ.  John Wiley devoted himself more to the Church at this time but also started to face hardships with his health. After teaching at the Kingwood Congregation he then was a teacher in Mirfield for several years and then also started to preach the gospel. After several more years of preaching he finally became ordained, but his health was quickly deteriorating.  John Wiley died still proclaiming his devotion to the Lord.

After reading the memoir it is hard not to ask myself, “What were the other family members doing at this time, and what were they feeling?”.  This is written by the children of John Wiley and they seem to be okay with his death since he will be closer to God whom John Wiley devoted much of his life too.  The children writing this memoir do not seem as if they are grieving his death but more celebrating his life. There are also some holes in the story, and I feel like there are parts missing when talking about his mental state.  In no instance do they talk about how worried they were, they always seemed to be positive throughout his whole life.

 

When looking at the document through voyant it helps organize keywords through visual images and much more.  In the John Wiley memoir the 5 most common words are years, time, great, lord, and life.  Lord and life appears a good amount in the memoir since it is about John Wiley’s life and religion played a big part of it.  When talking about time, it referred to time he spent in different places, and years referred to the same thing and also ages of people.  The word great was connected to various sentences and there was no clear pattern.

Above is a visual tool on voyant that allows the viewer to see the most frequent words.  When you put your mouse over one of the words it also highlights other words it is connected to in the document.

Above is the visual tool called “Cirrus” and it again highlights the keywords in the document in a visual image that would be able to be shown to anyone.

Above is a visual tool called “knots” and it has a line for a certain keyword, and every time the word is used the line bends a little bit making a knot.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Working with these old memoirs from the Moravian lives projects was very interesting and surprisingly fun.  Being able to read something that was written so long ago was something I have never done, and it was really engaging.  As I read about John Wiley’s life, I was able to imagine his life and almost grow attached to what I was writing down and feel like what I was doing was really important.  Even though reading the piece was engaging and interesting, it presented some challenges. To be able to create a digital text, we had to be able to read what the document said and write down exactly what was written, even if the punctuation or spelling was wrong.  The words were faded and the way that people wrote in the past was a lot different from how people write today. From the way they wrote cursive the their word choice, it was hard to be able to read it at times. Letters like F, T and L were sometimes hard to distinguish, as well as two words close together without a space.  Also, words were misspelled which presented a whole new challenge. We had to type out the misspelling and then correct it, but at times the misspelling was hard to make out what word they were trying to say. Luckily for the John Wiley memoirs, the archivist that had the documents were able to send our group clearer images of the original copies which was a game changer for being able to transcribe.  The help of the professors and also the students that came in to help us was also monumental for being able to transcribe, because their eyes have been trained to read these old documents. We then had to tag different parts of the text and point out a person’s name, dates, places, misspellings, and other things of that nature.

John Wiley Memoir

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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.