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Blog #2

Blog #2

How does the usage of the most frequently used words change throughout the memoir? Elizabeth Grundy writes a memoir of her life that she dedicates to her son, Br. James Grundy. Elizabeth lost her husband and became a widow, never remarrying before her death. Grundy was a very religious woman and relied heavily on God. Her father passed when she was young leaving her mother to care for the children. Grundy’s husband passed when he was 29 leaving her with a home, a baby, and a soon-to-be newborn. Immediately, Elizabeth had her newborn son join the church, so he would have a “father”, God. Elizabeth and her son, William, kept religion a top priority throughout their lives. Eventually, Elizabeth fell ill with her son, William, at her side. He told her it was time to go, and she passed peacefully at the age of 82.

 

After inputting the text into Voyant, it was determined that there are 4,888 words with 1,222 unique word forms. Her memoir has a vocabulary density of 0.25, ¼ of her word choices are unique. She also averages 28.1 words per sentence which seems to be high for a typical paper. Voyant provides researchers with the five most frequently used words in the corpus. After analyzing Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir, I am not surprised to see that the five most frequently used words are: Savior, time, son, God, and Jesus. The majority of the memoir is written about her life with her son and the way in which they incorporate religion into their lives. There are Grundy’s two most important things in her life, religion and her beloved son. Time can also relate to the time Elizabeth has left on Earth and the time until she reaches her final destination, heaven.

 

After analyzing the four sections we broke Grundy’s memoir up into, it has been determined that she speaks heavily of her son and the Savior throughout the entire writing. The keywords listed are: God, Brethren, life, Jesus, and Savior. God mainly has the collocate, people, and a few times has Savior. Brethren’s collocate is church while life’s is departed. This exemplifies Elizabeth Grundy speaking of passing over. Jesus’ collocates range greatly from the word mercy to the word end. The same types of words are used throughout the text. Everything seems to fall back on her son or religion.

 

Whitley talks about distant reading, the use of digital technology to recognize patterns. This type of reading can be used for one text or to compare multiple texts. We see this use of digital technology with the tools provided in Voyant. Whitley also speaks of the importance of using patterns during writing. He believes the brain is able to comprehend information quicker when using patterns. To determine how the usage of key terms changes throughout the passage, I have used the StreamGraph tool provided by Voyant. This tool graphs the 5 most frequently used words with each word having its own horizontal line on the graph. The lines are color-coded and they fluctuate throughout the graph representing the increase and decrease in usage. The more the words are used in a specific section, the higher the hump on the line goes. For example, Jesus has a very high bump towards the end of the first third of the passage but does not have a visible bump in the beginning. This shows that the word, Jesus, is used heavily at the end of the first third of the passage unlike at the beginning where it is not really used. At the end of the passage, the graph shows the words, Jesus and son, being used heavily. This makes sense because Grundy was dying at the end of the memoir and wrote frequently of how her son would be after her passing as well as praying to Jesus. Savior is used frequently during the memoir whereas God is only used in certain sections of the reading.

 

Trends is another tool that graphs the relative frequencies of the key terms verse the document segments. This tool is similar to the StreamGraph as it creates hills and valleys as the usage increases and decreases throughout the different sections of the memoir. Trends places a dot at the specific frequency for each word at each segment. The dots are then connected creating these lines. By hovering over each dot, researchers are able to determine the exact frequency of that word in that section.

 

The last tool I used to analyze patterns in the passage is the WordTree tool. WordTree places one of the key terms at the center of a “tree” and surrounds it with different useful words that are in front and behind the keyword throughout the memoir. These words that make up the “branches” of the “tree” are called collocates. For example, the collocates of the word Savior are dear, our, and my. Researchers also have the ability to click on these collocates, and the collocates of that specific collocate will appear as smaller “branches” connecting to the collocate. This allows researchers to analyze the different contexts the keywords are used in throughout the passage. These tools provided by Voyant are examples of spatial reading as talked about in the Whitley reading. Spatial reading involves the digital visualizations used to further the comprehension of the passage. It accesses different parts of the brain to do this.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=9bf1521b2f9d4815fd5232b94d287908

 

 

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=9bf1521b2f9d4815fd5232b94d287908

 

 

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=9bf1521b2f9d4815fd5232b94d287908

 

 

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Blog #2

Blog #2: On Distant Reading

As I previously mentioned in Assignment 1, the Memoir of Harriett Lees was about the life of a woman, Harriett Lees. Lees died on January 17th, 1842 at age thirty and was very sick with a bad cough and lung inflammation up until her death. Faith, the Saviour and the Church were extremely important to her because she was brought up learning the principles of the Church of England. She was born on February 11th, 1811 at the Woodford cum Membris in Northampton county. 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. Specifically, in the spring of 1837, she suffered from lung inflammation and was told to go to Lemington to try the water there, and it helped her temporarily. Lees was married on June 4, 1838 to 13th Brother William Lees of Leominster. After she got married, she was admitted to be a member of the Brn’s Church and became a regular at the Church. The following December, Lees had a son, but became sick again not much later. Near her death, she lost her sister which was devastating to her and caused a lot of anxiety. She continued to work for the church as long as she could and often attended services when she was well enough to do so. She gave birth to a second son and seemed to be feeling well after she had him, but that did not last very long. She continued to decline and was worried how this would effect her baby, but she continued to look to her Saviour for help and support. She stuck with her faith, even until the end and helped those in need as much as she could. She passed away leaving behind a husband, siblings, children, and friends.

The research question Paige and I came up with based off our interest in Harriett Lees’ life was: what is the typical language of a married sister in the Moravian Church?

I believe that using Voyant was very helpful in answering our research question. Voyant highlighted the key terms in the memoir of Harriett Lees which gave us insight on what her life was like and what was important to her. I saw how important the Savior was to her based on how frequently the word “Saviour” was used. I also realized how the women in the choir referred to one another as sister because I saw that the word “sister” was used many times and I was able to see the context it was presented in. After visualizing the data with Voyant, I wanted to learn more about the Moravians and came up with new questions. I want to know what a typical life is of a married sister in the Moravian Church and then I want to be able to compare it to the life of an unmarried woman from the same time period and location and see the differences. These questions that emerged through my use of Voyant stem from Johanna Drucker’s definition of visualization in the Whitley readings. She defined visualization as a tool that can provoke or inspire many questions instead of just answering one specific question.

After putting the text into Voyant, I learned that the Harriett Lees Memoir has 2,099 total words and 731 unique word forms. I find this very interesting because a high percentage of words used were not used more than once showing me that Lees was well-versed and most likely well-educated. Each sentence averaged about 80.7 words, which is also very high and affirms the idea of Lees being educated as a high average sentence length symbolizes a high education level. Another piece of data that Voyant provided me with was that the five most frequently used words (excluding stop words) in Lees’ memoir were: sister, time, savior, great, strength. I feel that because Lees used these words so often, they must have been ideas or things that were of much importance to her, which goes along with my idea that she looked toward her Saviour for strength. The word “sister” was very prevalent because that is what she was referred to by others and what women in the Church referred to one another as. Also because the text is a memoir and she went through major events in her life, it makes sense that “time” was a frequently used word.

In order to get the distinctive words and their collocates from the Harriett Lees memoir, I uploaded the Memoir of Br John Willey into Voyant. I found that the distinctive words in the Lees memoir were: tho, fit, partner, oh, and lees. Out of these five words, “partner” is the most important for my research because it answers the question we proposed. A married Moravian women most often used the word “partner” which makes complete sense. It was used in the context of discussing the relationship between Harriett Lees and her husband. They were very supportive of one another and stood by each other in difficult times. Voyant allowed me to partake in distant reading, a concept from the Whitley reading. Instead of closely reading every text, I looked at the patterns that emerged when comparing the two texts. It made seeing connections easier.

The visualizations I made from Voyant allow me to practice spatial reading, another concept from the Whitley reading. Spatial reading is transforming text into forms that takes advantage of visual perception instead of just using typical sequential reading. It uses patterns and creates “concept shapes.”Here are links to the visualizations I created from the memoir as well as screenshots of the visualizations themselves:

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=sister&query=time&query=saviour&mode=corpus&view=CollocatesGraph

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&view=TextualArc

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=strength&view=TermsBerry

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Blog #2

Nathan Ware’s Blog #2

My group’s project was to transcribe Esther Latrobe’s memoir. This memoir was a document written in script. After learning to decipher both the handwriting and general writing style of the text, we started to understand the life-story being described to us. Esther Latrobe was born on June 7th, 1802 in Bristol, Germany. She was the only daughter within a family of six children and was “tenderly loved” by both her siblings and parents (page 1). Early on, Latrobe was predisposed to a short life full of hardships. In her childhood, her first challenge was when she caught a deadly case of the measles. Although presently the measles is a relatively easy disease to cure with a high survival rate, such a disease was much more lethal in the 1800s due to a lack of medical resources. This sickness brought her to the brink of death, but with the strength of God, she became well again. A recurring theme within this memoir is her religious faith. She was brought up within a strict Catholic family. From reading this document, the reader can infer that through the many hardships she faced, Latrobe relied on her faith with God to keep moving forward. In fact, her physician always claimed that she had a shockingly high pain tolerance. To prove this claim, she also suffered from a rheumatic fever and heart problems that nearly killed her. However, yet again, she survived. The next devastation she endured was the death of her mother when she was only 11 years old. As the saying goes, nothing cuts deeper than a wounded heart. This wound scarred deeply into her heart, and she often wept in remembrance of her beloved mother. Nonetheless, through the acknowledgment of her friends, she felt the love that drove her to live on with her life. Consistently throughout the memoir, Latrobe looked to God for forgiveness, and then she reflected upon these wrongdoings to become a better person and strengthen her relationship with the Saviour. Even though she had deep emotional ties to the town of Tytherton, in which she spent over 6 years there, she went to Gracehill in 1826 to become a teacher at the “Ladies Boarding School”. Eventually, she went to Ayr and got married to Brother James Latrobe on the 28th of December. Later on, after going through labor for 4 days, she gave birth to a healthy boy on Friday, October 15th. Tragically, after living only 28 years, she died from illness. However, she honorably accepted death and asked her husband and other loved ones not to cry for her because she was now in the hands of the Lord.

After transcribing this document, we inputted our finished text into voyant tools. Within this transcription there are 8496 total words; of these words, 1809 of them are unique word forms. The most frequent terms are synonyms of the word “God” and also the collocates of these synonyms. For example, “Lord” is used 51 times, “Savior” is used 22 times and the word “God” itself is used 26 times. The word “oh” is used 37 times and is collocated with “God” 5 times and collocated with “Saviour” 4 times. The word “dear” is used 33 times and is collocated with “Saviour” 6 times. In the Bethlehem memoir transcribed by another group, they shared the frequent terms “Saviour” and “dear”. By comparing these frequent terms, the viewer can conclude that religion played an important role in the lives of the people from the 1800s.

All this data given to us through voyant tools takes us back to one critical question: What does this data and textual analysis provide to us that standard literature fails to do? “Humans are quite adept at perceptual visual cues and recognizing subtle shape differences. In fact, it has been shown that humans can distinguish shape during the pre-attentive psychophysical process” (Whitley, 193). In his article “Visualizing the Archive”, Edward Whitley explains how the brain is wired to recognize shapes and patterns.  

 

The picture above is a picture of the Cirrus tool from Voyant tools. Just by looking at this representation of the most frequent words, the reader can physically see the religious pattern of the text. Our group’s research question was: “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships?” Without reading Latrobe’s complex and lengthy memoir, our group easily got insight on the importance of religion within her life. Whitley also argues how digital humanities is superior to traditional literature in the sense of how complex text introduces the factor of the bottleneck effect. Although standard reading encourages the reader to pay closer attention, the human brain cannot sustain large intakes of information. When a text becomes too long, visualization tools and graphical analysis is useful. 

 

The visualization above is the tool Bubblelines. This tool spaces out the frequencies of the terms inputted and outputs them as a timeline. In this case, the input was the 5 most common words. Now the viewer would register that not only is religion a recurring topic but this topic is also consistently used throughout the entire memoir. However, as Whitley would agree, the field of Digital Humanities is not perfect. Sometimes, the reader needs the context of the story that only the close reading of literature can provide.

The picture above is the Knots tool. In this tool, you can click on any point of the lines and see the context in which the word was used within the text. However, by no possible means could you understand the in-depth life story of Latrobe from this graphical analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blog #2 Uncategorized

Esther Latrobe Voyant Tools

In Esther Latrobe’s memoir, as the reader, we learn that Esther Latrobe was born at Bristol on June 7th, 1802 into a loving family of five brothers and two parents. As she grew up she battled many illnesses such as the measles. To add to Esther’s rough upbringing, her mother passed when Esther was eleven years old. She then spent a lot of time in a dear place, Tytherton. She still had battles with illnesses such as rheumatic fever, which often required the Lord’s spirits to restore her as her medical assistants could not. Because of this attachment with her saviour she put her heart into the Lord. She had a deep connection with her faith that developed from a young age into her adulthood. Esther Latrobe then gave birth to a boy which caused her to become very sick. The way she connected with the Lord made her fear of death simmer. She felt comfort with her loved ones by her side as she faded into life with the Lord, death. She died at the age of 28.

With the use of Voyant Tools I was able to, as Frank Moretti states “step back and look at the broad patterns that emerge” (Whitley 188). These tools allowed me to see the most frequent words as well as the trends in the text. These tools gave me new perspective on the memoir including a broad view on the answer to our research question. Our research question was how did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships. Seeing the frequency of the word “Lord” and “spirits” helped draw conclusions on how big an influence these had during this medical crisis of her life. Although it didn’t draw in specifically on how the Lord and spirits impacted her life as that would require a closer reading of her memoir, it was mentioned enough for the reader to realize that it played a big role.

 

With the ability of Voyant Tools I was able to see that the most frequent words were “lord”, “oh”, “dear”, “god” and “heart” (which is tied with “let” and “said”) respectively. Being able to see this showed what had the biggest influence in Esther’s life as she had the most to say about it. Even better, the context on Voyant Tools allows you to see to the left and right of the word which allows you to see the context of the Lord in Esther’s life. Being able to see every single occurrence of the word allows you to see much more than the human eye could pick up on. Also the list allows you to compare each occurrence of the word on a visual chart in a very efficient matter that the human could not do alone.

Using the available tools in Voyant Tools helps “identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitley 198). Word clouds allow you to “spatially read a large body of text involving an interesting back-and-forth between close and distant reading” (Whitley 200). Having these tools helped draw large conclusions about the text which mainly relate back to her beliefs about Lord. Along with Tippett’s memoir, the Lord impacted the lives of many of this time period which shows how important religion was. “Lord” and “Saviour” were frequently used in both memoirs. Using visual tools such as bubblelines, wordcloud, cirrus, bubbles, and frequency grids provides visualizations about the text without reading the entire text. Being able to draw conclusions helps analyze not only Esther’s memoir but also all Moravian memoirs and that time period as a whole.