Tag: Missionary

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Blog #5

Blog #5

     Having the opportunity to use StoryMapJs was a unique one that has never been presented to me in any other class. I had done much of the visualization before in high school with tools similar to Voyant, and I had made timelines for almost all of my history classes, but being able to incorporate a whole new dimension, location, into my analysis is really something quite unique.

     While analyzing the space that Anna Elizabeth Rauch and her fellow missionaries covered on a map, I was able to see just how much distance they covered, and I realized the physical toll that this took on them. In the memoir, Anna passed away from rheumatic fever. From looking at this map, I can safely assume that the long travel across all of Jamaica was moderately harmful to her immune system, thus contributing to her demise. I think this is what Bodenhamer means when he says “All spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there (Bodenhamer 16). Now that I could see the full space that they covered, I was further able to understand the story.

     Relative to this time period, the concept of space and stance is extremely significant. In 1752, moving transnationally and even transcontinentally was a very strong commitment. Nowadays, it can take hours and sometimes even days to move that distance. In that time period, it took weeks, sometimes even months, to cover that span.

     Spatial Humanities is definitely more relevant to this time period because of the introduction of Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. Bodenhamer is an advocate of this practice, and he states that GIS is a “seductive technology” and that its images “appeal to us in ways more subtle and powerful than words can” (Bodenhamer 17). I feel that GIS is one of the most efficient ways to analyze space for the field of humanities.

     Anna Elizabeth Rauch’s journey did cover half the distance of Jamaica, but once she got to Mesopotamia (in Westmoreland), she mainly went from there to New Carmel and back, thus not providing for much GIS analysis. Also, there were not many maps available that had specific detail about where the plantations exactly were. Bodenhamer believes that GIS “favors precise data that can be managed and parsed within a highly structured tabular database”(Bodenhamer 23). GIS may not have been the best for this memoir, but it should be ideal for most.

     Since the missionaries didn’t move around much once they arrived at the sugarcane plantation, I decided to depict different Moravian Stations in Jamaica for most of my slides. I told the story of Anna, and then mapped a new location that a station was created upon. As Anna and her fellow missionaries completed more work in Mesopotamia, I would show the precise location of other stations, thus conveying the spread of the Moravians. I believe that this was the best way of representing the information in that it could properly give a scope to how large the Moravian movement was in Jamaica, and what overall effect they had on the slave populations there.

Find the link for my StoryMapJs here: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/cb5a3878723de184037f5257d0519d56/anna-elizabeth-rauch/index.html

 

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/cb5a3878723de184037f5257d0519d56/anna-elizabeth-rauch/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

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Blog #2 contextual research

Grafton & TimelineJS Analysis

Blog # 2

Through reading Grafton’s Introduction, I learned that the two modes of representation are chronology and geography. These two modes immensely help clarify historical events, but they also obscure events. With regards to determining all there is to know about a certain event, these two modes help immensely because we know exactly WHEN and WHERE that particular event happened. With this, we can make deductions or inferences about why that said event occurred.

Timelines are actually less than 250 years old (Grafton 14). All they really are is a way of visualizing the numbers that we use to record our history, but they can also restrict our outlook on life. Grafton says “The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have” (Grafton 14). It makes time way more linear than it has to be and almost completely removes the flexibility of our concept of time. It has been hard to come to terms with these ideas and modes of representation, but I have done it successfully. By telling us a one-way story, they have told us a chronology of our perception of the world, but have also erased our opportunity to perceive time as a story.

This concept is actually extremely relevant to my group’s project. We were assigned the Bethlehem memoirs to transcribe an analyze. Other groups’ assignments were the memoir of one person, but we had several different writers to transcribe. So as other groups would have one coherent timeline for all of their events, we had 4 or 5 separate, overlaying timelines.

With this in mind, conceptualizing the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation was near impossible. We were just given seemingly unrelated transcriptions with no background. We had to use different sources to get a deeper understanding of what we read. For example, Professor Faull gave me a book titled “A Tale of Two Plantations”, which depicted the lives of slaves in the Mesopotamian slave plantation in Jamaica, and how the Moravian missionaries brought the Gospel to them.

 

Viewing the timeline as a rigid linearity would be ineffective, as there are multiple stories going on at once. Grafton says that our idea of time “is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (Grafton 13). The key here is flexibility, and being able to perceive several chronologies at once. TimeLine JS made this flexible view possible by stacking the different events on top of each other as they occurred.

Overall, using TimeLine JS made analyzing these events easier in that it gave a way to compare the events throughout time. This has given a deeper meaning to all of our separate work; it has integrated everything we’ve worked for together.

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Blog #2

Blog #2

For my group’s transcriptions, we analyzed the Bethlehem memoirs, which include memoirs about Joseph Lingard, Henry Unger, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, and others. Since these memoirs are typically associated with the Christian church, we wanted to find out what kind of impact the church had in their lives. Our decided central question is: Was the Congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of the Moravian People?

The manuscript that I analyzed was about the life of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I had the first five out of the nine pages of the small account of her life and “departure”.  In these first few pages, Anna travels to Jamaica to visit her slaves on the Mesopotamia slave plantation. Throughout the manuscript, Anna praises God for her safe travels to Jamaica. She first started at Port Royal, and then retired to Carmel, where she came down with rheumatic fever. At that time, they didn’t have a cure, so rheumatic fever was potentially terminal. She felt a little better later on, and went to visit her slaves every now and then in Mesopotamia. Anna was really friendly with the slaves, and she also maintained a great relationship with God at this time. She became really weak in 1762, and eventually reached the point where she could barely move. At one point, her husband proposed her to go to Mesopotamia. She felt too weak to go, but went anyways, insisting she had made out with her Savior concerning it. In this last page of my part of the memoirs, she confronted to Charles while crying, and said her final goodbyes to him, because she knew she was terminal.

Voyant proved to be a superior way to analyze the transcriptions as a whole, as well as my individual transcription. Voyant was especially helpful in that the word analysis tools provided proved to be extremely helpful to me.

I liked the cirrus in that it gave me a physical manifestation of all of the different word frequencies. I also enjoyed the collocates feature, which gave the most occurring context of each word. One of the most prominent adjacencies was with “dear” and “savior”, which helps to convey their attitude towards religion. Whitney believes that “word clouds have proven to be quite popular…for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitney 199).

Voyant’s Cirrus

My personal favorite way to analyze the text was with TermsBerry. This was a visually appealing way of analyzing the context of the most prominent words in the text. The TermsBerry consists of “berries” of different sizes with regards to the frequency of the word. When you scroll over that word with the mouse, it glows green and the words that are in context with that word glow up in red.

These specific tools would not be available for me if it was not for the growing industry of digital humanities. Before the age of modern technology, it would not be possible to perform such a vast analysis on a text this size in the same span of time. As in the words of Whitney “the forces of the digital era are rethinking the ways that read at the same time that American literature scholars are rethinking the ways that we archive large bodies of texts” (Whitney 201).With these means of analysis, I am able to draw significant conclusions about the text, such as that religion and the congregation are proposed with a positive connotation. It seems as if the missionaries genuinely enjoy their devotion to the Lord, and their life revolves an optimistic viewpoint of our Creator.

For the entire Bethlehem memoir transcription, my words with the highest frequency were savior(20), heart(18), dear(14), year(13), congregation(11), and brethren(10). Upon seeing these visualizations, I started to derive an answer for my central question. As in the wise words of Whitley, “The goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inquiry” (Whitley 189). The pattern that consistently emerges in all of the visual tools is the prevalence of all the ecclesiocentric behavior.