Tag: religion

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Blog #2

Blog #2

The full transcription which I entered into Voyant had a total of 3,807 words with 796 unique word forms. There are an average of 1,269 words per sentence. Visualization tools like Voyant make texts much more understandable. Our Moravian memoirs were challenging to grasp, and so using Voyant helped me greatly. Voyant allowed me to interact with the text in a new way and helped me to answer our research question of how religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription. The Cirrus word cloud and the Corpus Terms allowed me to view the frequency of words in the text. The most frequent words in the corpus are heart, times, time, poor and love. The Cirrus word cloud presents frequently used words in  larger text for emphasis. This is a practice of spatial reading, which I found to be very helpful. Seeing texts in visual form allowed me to view the text more clearly. As Whitley explains, “such visualizations help us to perceive patterns in data that we might otherwise miss” (187). The Corpus Terms provided me with data that showed exactly how many times each word was used in the document. It was interesting to see that the word “heart” was used 31 times and that “Jesus” was used 13 times. These tools exposed the very religious nature of the text. “You find your perspective broadened through a series of unexpected discoveries” (185). Through Voyant, I was able to participate in Distant Reading, a concept explained in the Whitley text. Through Distant Reading, I was able to make connections and see the greater picture rather than closely reading every text and miss important aspects of the memoir. I might not have been able to draw such conclusions about Tippet’s memoir through reading it plainly without Voyant. These tools “challenge us to read texts differently than we otherwise would” (186).  The bubble tool shows the key words which are most frequently used as the ones with biggest bubbles which makes it easy to visualize rather than reading terms off of a list. I like the visualization tools because they allow me to understand the information better.

Tippet was born in 1711 in the Parish of Bitton. He discusses his struggles in his family life. His father died when he was quite young, and he relied on God to get him through this massive loss.  It seems that he is troubled and due to some dark statements throughout the piece.  He mentions that he, “wishes he was never born”. He criticizes himself extensively and describes his reliance on God in order to move past issues in his earlier life. By asking ourselves the question of ‘how does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription’ we are able to analyze and understand the writing better. This question also helped us to compare Samuel Tippet’s memoir to Esther Latrobe’s memoir. For the Esther Latrobe memoir, the key terms were lord, dear, god, let and savior which is why our research question on religion pertains to their piece as well. The key terms for the pieces combined are Lord,time, heart, dear, and oh. The many tools available in Voyant allowed me to analyze and understand these memoirs. Tippet’s memoir is much shorter than Latrobe’s. Latrobe’s memoir is a much longer piece with 8,460 words. Using some of the tools such as terms berry, tells the Voyant user that the word ‘God’ was used 26 times in the Latrobe memoir.

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot1.pdf

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot2.pdf

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot3.pdf

 

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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. 

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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.