Tag: religion

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Blog #4

Blog #4

Through marking up my memoir and rereading it multiple times, I was able to gain a better understanding of the main topics Elizabeth Grundy was trying to portray throughout. In the process of adding tags on certain words, I was able to determine the most frequently used tags; Elizabeth Grundy used people and role names frequently in her memoir. As stated by Pierazzo, “a digital edition can represent many more features than a print publication can,” (Pierazzo 472). She spoke often of her son and some form of God. By doing this, I was able to come up with an idea of the important things in her life; she always made her son a priority and focused on religion everyday. Although the web provides all of these features, sometimes it still lacks features only printed texts can provide. Pierazzo says, “the web has some limitations: we cannot, for instance, reproduce easily some of the calligrammes,” (Pierazzo 472).

In the beginning of the transcription process it was easy to divide up the pages that everyone was assigned to transcribe. Each group member was responsible for 5-6 pages, and every member had their transcriptions finished by the due date. It got harder once we were each assigned with adding tags to our transcribed pages. This part was confusing at first and involved a lot of talk among my group members and I. One member was absent during the class period when we were finishing the tags and did not have it finished in time for when the final file with everyone’s changes were sent out. I was unsure as to how I was going to receive their changes. After experiencing this, I can imagine working in a much larger group with members across the globe makes it very difficult to compile everyone’s work into one space and make the changes necessary throughout the project. Communication is key when participating in group projects, and in larger projects, it is vital that group members complete tasks by the specific due dates otherwise things begin to get much more confusing than they need to be. After completing this project, I have a better appreciation for edited texts and a better understanding as to how they are produced. I use code for my major constantly, and it was interesting to see one of the many things code can be used for as most of my projects in computer science are very different.

Another difficulty our group faced was the decision involving which words should be given which tags. We spoke in class and created a google doc. This document contained the rules to determine the tags of questionable words. These words related to the different names for God and words similar to son or mother. We decided these names for God would be considered role names and words similar to son and mother would not be considered names. If there was a question a group member had during marking up the memoir, they would ask the group during class, and it was get answered. We did not face any difficult decisions during the mark up. Similar to this, we also had to determine whether or not we would change spellings in the memoir to make them correct. Pierrazo states in her article, “Austen’s favoured spellings have been preserved and marked, such as the inversion of the diphthong,” (Pierazzo 469). When transcribing texts to make them accessible on the web, it is difficult to agree on the many rules each member needs to follow during their transcription.

 

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Blog #2

Blog #2

Research Question: How do the frequent terms within voyant relate to the theme of John Willey’s memoir?

 

The memoir Rosemary, Jacob, and I transcribed is written by John Willey’s children after his death. Willey was a honorable servant of the Lord in the Brn Church. Willey comes from a religious family; his father, brothers, and himself all held active roles in the Church. Unfortunately, John Willey’s mother passed away when he was just six years old. But Willey’s courage and love allowed him to still live a great and loving life. Willey’s eventual passion for religion at 21 years old gave him the faith and love for something greater than himself. Willey attended and taught at religious schools, growing love for his pupils. Eventually, Willey was given the honor of becoming a minister, one of his goals in life. Later, Willey marries a teacher he worked with, named Susan Hutton, whom Willey had four children with. One of his daughters passed away in her early infancy. Despite a long and happy life, Willey suffered through medical issues his last six years prior to death. Most of his vital organs were affected, and Willey was mostly unable to commit to his duty to the church. He maintained a positive outlook on life through his suffering. Willey was still extremely faithful and believed everything would workout well. All he wanted to do was get back to his duty as a minister. The memoir ends with Willey’s family comforting him through song as he passes away. Willey and his family maintain positive up through his death, believing he is leaving his suffering to go be happy with the Lord. Overall, the memoir of John Willey is an excellent story of a man who lived an honorable life as a servant to his Lord, and eventually had his spirits lifted to be with the Lord.

 

The Willey memoir consists of 3,519 words in total. Of those words, 1,106 were described as unique word forms, displaying the complexity of Willey’s texts. Additionally, Willey’s memoir seems to have a pretty standard sentence structure to todays writing, considering the average sentence length of 33.5 words. Through using Whitley’s tool described as distant reading, I was able to see the key patterns emerging in Willey’s text. For example, illey’s frequently appearing words are years, time, great, Lord, life, love and Jesus. This leads me to believe that Willey lived a happy life, filled with faith. Through comparing Samuel Tippett’s memoir with Willey’s on voyant, there are some clear patterns emerging across their lives. For example, both these memoirs are filled with religion. Common words emerge, like Lord and savior, clearly portraying both these men’s passions toward religion. Additionally, love is a word appearing in both texts, perhaps showing that their faith towards religion promoted a sense of love in their lives. Overall, through examining Willey’s and Tippett’s texts, and skimming through a bunch more, there is a clear sense of a passion towards religion in these memoirs. This is very interesting, considering the different locations and time periods these men lived their lives.

 

Visualization, is a tool especially prevalent on voyant, which was introduced to me by the Whitley reading. Almost every tool I worked with on voyant has some form of visualization to it. For example, the cirrus is an excellent resource for compiling all the key terms. Then, using collocates is a great way to further examine which of those words often relate to each other. For example, I noticed that great and years often appeared near each other, as well as savior and Lord. This leads me to believe Willey had great years in his life and viewed his Lord as his savior.

 

Through examining voyant tools, as well as reading through the Willey text, my research question was clearly answered. There is a very clear connection between the frequently appearing words, and the common theme of Willey’s memoir. For example, the words like years, great, Lord, love and Jesus all clearly portray that Willey’s life was a happy one filled with religion. This is reflected in my reading, as Willey devoted his life to his religious workings and seemed to be happy with this choice. Willey also used his faith to maintain happiness in his suffering toward the end of his life. Similarly, Whitley explains how human brains are able to easily notice patterns in their reading. Interestingly, voyant tools put all those patterns in one place, allowing me to notice the same themes I picked up on while reading.

 

 

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

The text that I had was an account of the life of Anna Rosina Anderson. She was born in 1727 on August 9th. She was a very religious person, who oftentimes used faith to justify the things that happened to her. She lost her father at the age of 7 and since then she’s moved around a lot. The process of creating the digital text was not the easiest task to do because it was written in a different time period. It was from the 18th century therefore resulting in it being almost a different language. Also the fact that it written out instead of typed was another problem that I had to face because at some points the handwriting was illegible, taking away from my understanding of the story. I also encountered the problem of the fact that she referenced places in Germany and in England that I wasn’t familiar with. That with the fact that it was written made it hard for me to be able to make out the places that she was talking about. Other than that, there were not any problems that prohibited me from understanding the text. I was not that connected to the documents in the beginning because I was too focused on just trying to understand the handwriting. However I started to appreciate the document when it all came together in the end. I was able to give a thorough read to understand the story as a whole instead of understanding one sentence, then forgetting what it said because I was already onto the next sentence.

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Blog #2

Voyant Analysis

For my transcription project, my group and I transcribed the works of Samuel Tippett. Tippett reflects on his life and his coming of age. He starts by speaking of his life as a young boy. As Tippett describes it, “I have been such a bad Boy”. (2) Instead of becoming an apprentice like his mother so desperately wanted, he worked in the coal pits where he was able to continue his childish and deceitful behavior. Once he realized his life decisions and trajectory were not something he was proud of, he made a serious effort to change his life. He wanted nothing more than to become a responsible and religious family man, but unfortunately, as he began this journey he was constantly reverting back to his old habits. Later in his life, Tippett decided to marry, and with this wife he had eleven kids. (It is interesting that this is the only time he mentions his wife or kids in the entire text.) Tippett found that even having a family was not enough to make him change into the man that he so desperately wanted to become. Eventually he decided to attend an event where a man, Mr. Whitfield, spoke and this changed Tippett’s life. Mr. Whitfield explained that Jesus does forgive and even people who have been involved in mischief can be accepted by the Lord. Hearing this made Tippett realize that he too could eventually be seen in a positive light by his Savior. After this, Tippett made it his life goal to gain the acceptance of Jesus. He became part of group, which consisted of people, much like himself, that met regularly to learn about Jesus and how to turn their lives around. He began praying ten to twenty times a day and writing too people that he looked up to. He wrote to these people with his problems and questions on how he could better himself. Their willingness to respond really meant a lot to Tippett. Eventually when his group, that would meet almost daily, began to lose members he took it upon himself to rebuild. He moved these meetings to his house in hopes of continuing the tradition. Finally, in 1754, he meets a disciple who had travelled to Bristoll. Tippett saw this a sign from Jesus. Jesus had brought this man into Tippett’s life and he instantly felt a connection. For the rest life Tippett saw this man as his best friend. He was able to stay close to the Disciple even when the Disciple’s business was done in Bristoll and he moved back to London. This stability and companionship was exactly what Tippett needed and he used this friendship as a tool to enjoy the later parts of his life.

What was written above is information that can only be gathered by reading the entire text. There is another way of reading that will not give the reader as detailed of an analysis as reading the entire document would, but it can be very helpful. This process of reading is called distant reading. Voyant is website that allows for the input of documents and it will read, analyze, and produce creative visual tools that summarize the text. I used Voyant to analyze and compare the text from Samuel Tippett’s and Esther Latrobe’s memoirs. Voyant produced a list of five key terms between the two texts: Lord, heart, time, dear, times. These are the five terms that appear the most between these two texts. Seeing that the word Lord is used a total of sixty-one times between the two documents was very predictable. In the time that both Tippett and Latrobe lived religion was incredibly important to individuals and often they would write about it. If you use the links tool you can see the words most often used with lord, time, and heart. The interesting thing you see with this visualization technique is that only one word is used with both lord and heart. This word is love. The last thing I noticed while using Voyant was the most frequent terms used in each text. Samuel Tippett who is coming of age in his memoir uses the word heart most often while Esther Latrobe uses the word lord most frequently. This could be because Tippett was experiencing a more personal journey than Esther. These are just some of the few observations I made while using Voyant.

 

 

Even without reading the full text, using Voyant would have been enough for someone to briefly answer my groups research question. The question we hoped to answer was how does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippett’s transcription? Traditionally to answer a question like this it was seen as mandatory to read the whole text slowly and carefully, but tools like Voyant allow us to do it a bit differently. Voyant allowed us to collect a broad understanding of two individuals religious beliefs before having to read the text. Seeing that “lord” and “heart” were two of the most commonly used words in around sixty pages of text tells the viewer that both individuals took religion very seriously. Whitley speaks of gaining broad knowledge over a plethora of texts can sometimes be better than super in-depth analysis of just one literary piece. My personal opinion is that if we were to add memoirs of other individuals from the same time period we would continue to see the presence of “lord” in their writing, further supporting the idea that religion was a giant part of these people’s lives in the 18th century and viewers would be able to see that immediately.