Tag: Rosine Tanneberger

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final blog

Olivia Smith- Final Project

After working closely with my group members (Sam Salazar, Brendan Matthys, and Ethan Conklin) and familiarizing ourselves with the resources used throughout the semester, our final project seemed less overwhelming than I had originally anticipated. Essentially, this project consisted of a collective form of all the “mini” projects and assignments that we had already done for The Humanities Now! class. We were just giving them a home when we uploaded them onto the WordPress site.

I had worked with the WordPress platform in a previous class last year and already knew some basics about operating and designing my own website. Though Brendan did most of the changes on the website, my fellow group members and I were assisting him in what we thought best suited our project. Brendan became the leader of this group very quickly and began delegating different tasks to each member and offered assistance when we needed it. This was very effective for the members of our group because it really pushed us to get the work done. I know that the members of my group and I are very proud with the way that our website has turned out. Additionally, I think that creating a website for the research that we did on the Bethlehem Memoirs was the best way to fully display our hard work from the semester.

We wanted to make the central focus of our site our research question: “Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian people according to our memoir? If so, how does it play into their lives?” We did this by keeping the question centered on the home page so that our viewers could reference it at any point. Also, located on the home page is a simple explanation of the purpose of our site and the various technologies that we have used to answer this question.

After we transcribed every memoir, we uploaded them onto the “Oxygen” platform that Dr. Jakacki taught us how to use. From there, we were able to tag people’s names, place names, emotions, events, and health. After that, we extracted the entities that were important in answering our research question. We chose to compare emotions to place names to analyze how the Moravian people viewed their congregations. The entities were uploaded onto a “Google Fusion” table which you can view in the Tag Frequencies tab on the website.

One of my favorite parts about this website is how interactive it is. The Timeline, Storymap.Js, and Voyant tabs provide information about our research while also requiring the viewer of the site to follow along and explore each platform. Because the Bethlehem Memoirs consisted of multiple people, our timeline project was very unique. We had a stacked timeline that so that the viewer could see the events that occurred during this time period according to each person from the memoir. Grafton wrote about this in his introduction by saying “by comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work”(Grafton, pg. 15).

I think the most important tab located on our website would have to be the Storymap.js tab. You can explore a story map for any one of the four major memoirs that we transcribed. Because there were numerous people in the Bethlehem memoirs, each member from our group had focused on one particular person from the memoir throughout the semester. On this tab, you can select one of those people and it will take you to their storymap. This was essential for our website because it displayed how far each person traveled by pinpointing places that they mentioned in their memoirs. This visualization of mapping that we used was principal to the project because it took every point and created a visual that allowed the viewer to analyze the distance that was travelled.Adding to that point, Drucker wrote, “…however we classify the visualization that we use, they all require the same analytic approach to expose the working of their graphical organization as meaning-producing” (Drucker, pg. 66). My memoir, Rosine Tanneberger, was kind of different from the others because her journey was short. She only traveled from her birth place of Mankendorf, Moravia to Gnadenfrei, Germany.

Lastly, we chose to use Voyant. This was the first platform that we explored for this class and we felt that it would be pretty necessary to include it in this project. Similarly to our entities, it extracts words from the memoirs and puts it into a distinct visualization, but using Voyant we were able to analyze it through all of our memoirs collectively. This platform is pretty cool to play around with because there are so many different options to create your own visualization of the words. We only included the a few that we felt represented our memoir best. These included Cirrus, TermsBerry, Textual Arc, and Links. My favorite visualization comes from the Cirrus tool because it creates a clear depiction of the visualization that emphasizes the most frequently used words. The biggest words are used the most across all memoirs, while the smaller words are used less. “Heart”, “Dear”, and “Congregation” are just few of the many words, but they are seen as the largest words using this tool.

Overall, I think that my group members and I are very proud of the work that we have put into this project and website. The most important part of this whole project is that we got to explore the lives of Moravian people through analyzing their work. We had fun creating this website together and even added a special tab that includes Moravian Music which you can listen to while exploring the site. Even though there was a lot that was involved in creating this project, it made the semester fly by and I’m really going to miss working with Ethan, Brendan, and Sam as well as these memoirs. I hope you enjoy our website just as much as I do!

http://bethlehemhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

 

P.S. Thank you for a great semester!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blog #5

Blog #5

My experience with StoryMap JS was frustrating at times, to say the least, but once my map was completed there was a clear visual representation of the path traveled by Rosine and, her husband, Michel Tanneberger. I struggled the most with finding the towns on my basemap because of how many were present and how small the font was. Once I located both the towns that were included in my memoir, it was clear to me how far Rosine and Michel had to travel and it was evident how important space and time were in relation to their travels. As Bodenhamer mentions, “We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order our world” (pg. 14).

Back in the 18th century, their main form of transportation was by foot. When I put both of these locations into the modern form of Google Maps it says that it is 286km, which is 177.712 miles. Though the memoir doesn’t reveal where or when Rosine stopped along her journey, I’m sure that the places she chose were influential to her overall experience of traveling to a foreign land. I believe that the route of travel taken by the Tanneberger’s most accurately represents change, historical, in a spatial way. Bodenhamer explains this in the book by saying, “Spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product determinant of change. They are not passive settings but the medium for the development of culture” (pg. 16).

I believe that mapping out historical events can create a visualization that is appealing both spatially and contextually. It usefully links both history and geography to create a story through time. After creating my own Story Map for this memoir and reading the passage from Bodenhamer, I realized how important this was to the project. It brought all of our information together to create a visual story.

Rosine Tanneberger’s memoir was very short, so I was limited with choice on which points to plot. I decided to plot her birthplace and where she traveled to. In addition to that, I plotted points in those towns (Mainly Mankendorf) when she expressed a feeling, and then described why.  Bodenhamer justified this point in his passage as, “the spaces of interest to the humanities also could be personal- emotional space or the body in space- and even metaphorical or fictional…” (pg. 21). Now that I have more experience working with maps and the Story Map JS website, I’m feeling more confident in my abilities to understand the visual and spatial representation that I created through this project with my memoir.

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/e4b672c558d1e2012a20b97975d43abf/olivia-smith-bethlehem-memoirs/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

 

 

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Blog #2

Blog #2

As a group, working on this project has allowed for us to develop a research question about the role of the congregation and if the Moravian people perceived it in a positive or negative way.  From what I could understand about these memoirs, the congregation offered hope and reconciliation with their faith.  

The portion that I transcribed from the Henry Unger memoir was told from the third person point of view and talked about his journey to find mercy and forgiveness from his savior and congregation. It was described as finding “Rest for his poor Soul.” In the second memoir that I assisted in transcribing, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, it talked about her sharing how sinners can seek forgiveness to “Negroes” in Mesopotamia. She struggled with her health, but felt that she was visited by the Lord and needed to spread his word to the rest of the people of Mesopotamia. Lastly, the Rosine Tanneberger memoir talked about her life and journey to find “rest for her poor soul” as well. All three of these memoirs spoke of their religion as a means of solving underlying issues.

When all of our memoirs were entered into the Voyant Tools website, I was able to explore this research through the digital humanities approach. There were numerous key terms brought to my attention that assisted in the answering of this research question. I was able to see how often the words “Heart,” “Year,” “Came,” “Dear,” “Saviour,” and “Congregation” were present in the Bethlehem memoirs. With this website, we could also explore how the words were used in relation to other words. Also, it put the most commonly used words into a visual of a graph that determined trends amongst the words. We compared our memoir to the Latrobe memoirs and found that their most frequently used words were “Lord,” “Dear,” “God,” “Saviour,” and “Let.”

This was more helpful, compared to the traditional humanistic means, because the viewer is using distant reading. As Whitley describes it, distant reading uses specific data like quantitative and qualitative information to create a visual representation of what is read. This is a different form of reading and offers the analyzation of textual data. To quote Whitley “…the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they might otherwise be, whereas literary close readings often reveal that apparently straight forward texts are more complex than they might otherwise seem” (pg. 188).

The use of Voyant Tools allowed me to visualize the most commonly used terms and actually see how important religion was in the lives of the Moravian people. When I was working on this assignment, originally, I hadn’t paid attention to what I was reading. When I was finished transcribing I read over the material and struggled to find context in the sentences. From the Whitley reading we did for class I learned that many of the tools can pull out words that we don’t necessarily recognize while we are reading, specifically words that we tend to skip over.  This was made evident after I entered the memoirs into Voyant because it became clear to me how often they spoke of their religion and how positively their “Savior” was represented.