Tag: Religious

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Blog #2

After transcribing Samuel Tippet’s piece with my group members, we came up with a research question that we felt was appropriate. Our research question was:

How does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription?

Tippet’s piece begins with him describing himself. He was born in 1711 in the Parish of Bitton. He also describes his family life and his challenges. His father had died when he was very young, and he turned to God during this period of hardship. Personally, I think he is a little troubled and very dark because several times throughout the pieces he “wishes he was never born” and questions himself what life would be like without him. He criticizes, and self scrutinizes himself and all of the mistakes that he has made throughout his life. Throughout the piece, he describes how he turns to God because of the mistakes he had made in his earlier life.

By asking ourselves this question, it helps the reader or transcriber understand the piece more and analyze it better. When comparing our piece (Samuel Tippet) to another piece, the research question also came into play. The research question also applied to the Esther Latrobe’s memoir.

When using Voyant, each memoir’s key terms comes up. For our piece, the key terms were heart, times, time, poor, and love. 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 combined key terms for the pieces are Lord, heart, time, dear, and oh. Using Voyant, there are many tools available that help you decipher and analyzed a piece. For our piece (Samuel Tippet), it is much shorter than the Latrobe Memoir. Samuel Tippet’s piece had a little around 4,000 words (3,806 words to be exact). In our piece, there was almost no punctuation which made the words/sentence equal to 1,268. The Latrobe’s statistics are more accurate because of the use of punctuation. It was a much longer piece with 8,460 words. The words\sentence was 24.6 which seems to make a lot more sense. Using some of the tools such as terms berry, it tells the Voyant user that the word ‘God’ was used 26 times in the Latrobe memoir. Using the bubble tool, the key words that are most frequently used are the ones with biggest bubbles which makes it easy to tell and visualize instead of just reading terms off of a list. Personally, I like the visualization tools the most because it helps me understand recognize the key terms in a piece better. Other tools such as ‘Grid Tools’ seem very standard to me and have the terms in a chart. Attached, I included a few photos of the tools I used with Voyant.

 

 

 

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Assignment #1

I found transcribing these pieces of work to be a very fascinating process. I have never completed a project like this before. I think that this project has given us an incredible opportunity. We have been given the chance to create digital artifacts from real journal entries. I found this project to be very special and meaningful. I really enjoyed reading the journal entries and being able to read them felt very personal. I imagined how long ago these were written and by who. There is something very personal about interpreting someone’s journal entries, especially for the first time. There were many deep emotions that were touched on in the texts which made me feel a connection to the work.

It was great to learn about these people of the Moravian church through their writing. From their writings, they seem to be very religious. It is unbelievable to think about the circumstances under which these entries were written and how different people’s lives are today. Reading these texts and transcribing them was a very intriguing process. It was quite difficult, yet allowed me to appreciate what I was doing even moreso. There were many words I was unable to read due to illegible handwriting and misspellings. Many of the words might’ve been spelled differently during this time period, but they also could’ve been due to human error. I completed the transcriptions through trying to decode words in my mind to the best of my ability. My group members and I often compared different words with each other to try to fully figure them out. It was helpful to get other perspectives on words from my group members. When I finally figured out a word which I was confused about, it was the most satisfying feeling. Completing these transcriptions almost felt as if I was completing a jigsaw puzzle.

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My works (4,9,11,12):

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000754

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000759

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000761

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000762

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

The hardest aspect of the transcription process was learning to read 19th century British handwriting because everything I read now, whether it be textbooks or online articles, is in print. Although I learned how to read and write in cursive in grade school, it was hard reading a person’s handwriting because the letters were not always clearly written out. However, I do understand it is very difficult to write consistently, especially when writing memoirs that are 40 pages long. Another problem I faced was more technical because the pictures of the pages were blurry so it was hard to read the sentences at all. Also, I could not distinguish the different punctuation marks on some pages because they either looked like streaks of ink or other punctuation marks. Thankfully, Professor Faull had requested her colleagues to send clearer pictures so I was able to transcribe all of the pages. I realized it is crucial to have clear digital copies in order to transcribe and analyze any historic documents. Without clear documents, it is impossible to create accurate digital texts which is crucial for allowing anyone on the Internet to have access to information only scholars would have had without the digitization of historical documents. It was interesting to be able to read these documents because I think as a management student at Bucknell, I would have not had the opportunity to learn about the Moravian documents. It was interesting to read Esther Latrobe’s memoir because I would not have had the opportunity to learn about a Christian woman who lived in 19th century England otherwise. I was surprised to read the same phrases that Christians still use till this day like “The Lord Our Shepard”, “everlasting kingdom” and “he speaks, the universe obeys”. As a person who grew up in the Church, I never thought about whether or not Christians in the past centuries used the same jargon as modern day Christians even though the culture changed in reaction to society changing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JskmdGh4grdhqHksXQmYSCRA0D3VlchO1ceAMjTDobo/edit

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Assignment #1

The understanding of how the transcription of a material document affects the researcher’s connection with that document. In my personal experience, transcribing the Moravian Lives piece in specifics the Samuel Tippet piece it was something that I had never done before. I have never completed a project similar to this one which is why I genuinely enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to me reading the work that the people of the Moravian Church had written. My group’s piece in particular was very religious and I’m assuming that this aspect was similar to a lot of the other groups’ works. I had never learned about these people before and it was intriguing to learn about them by reading their work and transcribing. It affects my understanding because it was almost like I was reading their journal or diary; it was a collection of their thoughts and at times it was super personal. There were also a few times because there were a few discrepancies within the text. Sometimes it was difficult to read and also there were misspellings. Perhaps this is how they spelled it at this certain time period, or just human error.

The process of digital text creation for my group started with dividing up who would transcribe what pages. After, we began to ‘decode’ in my mind. I would read the page and try to understand it best I could and later transcribe it. I would normally bold words I was unsure about or place a ‘?’ if I had no idea and check with my group partners after finishing the full page. I would tag people and places after I finished transcribing the page because I found it easier to do since the page told a little story and I started to pick up on words that were used often such as brother. I learned that this word needed to be tagged and was being used in a religious manner. After finishing all of my assigned pages, my group members double checked to make sure that all of our pages were both correctly transcribed and tagged. I felt that I had a connection to the documents because of how personal they were. For example, in some of the pages I transcribed the author spoke about their heart breaking and several emotions such as sadness and despair. I felt like I knew the character because of how deeply they were speaking and because I was rewriting their own words which no one had done before. The links to the original piece as well as my group’s transcribe piece are below.

 

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

Transcribed Works Main Link: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My Work: (Pgs. 7,8,10,15): http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000757

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000758

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000760

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000765