Tag: Samuel Tippett

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Blog #5

Tippett Storymap

Although Tippett did not travel much throughout his memoire, his frequent movement, from Kingswood to Bristol to Hanham Mount and around that area does reveal a lot about him. After starting his religious quest, Tippett would travel up-to 10 km to meet up with a preacher just to invite them to his house. Tippett, in the name of religion, went all the way to London. As Bodenhamer mentioned “they[places] are not passive settings but the medium for development of culture. All spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there” (16). This statement could not be more true in the memoire. Places such as Hanham Mount, Kingswood, etc, all provide a medium for the development of Moravians nearby and around the world at that time. Hanham Mount provided a beginning to famous Morivian and non-moravian preachers like Cennick, Whitfield and Wesley.

Tippett’s memoire brings some confusion as to the placement of Hanham Mount, Kingswood and Bristol. He mentions listening to preachings under the sycamore trees near Wesley’s school, which is in Kingswood, but mentions being in Hanham Mount. It is a bit confusing where Wesley’s school was back then or weWe can see how the data presented by Tippett would directly conflict with a GIS mapping system. GIS favors precise data unlike the unique, ambiguous and uncertain data presented here by Tippett (Bodenhamer 23). This is where “old” methods of mapping would be favored, where there is a lot of ambiguity.

For my story map, I used the different places Tippett travelled and mentioned as a guide to help me understand how much he travelled throughout his life. Using these places, I determined what the relation of the place is to Tippett and figured out how it is important in his life. Places like Bitton and Kingswood were very important as he lived in those places. Although the map I chose is an old map, it still has a component of a GIS map and shows multiple layers, it shows if a place is above, below or at sea level (27). The places which Tippett traveled to were all at sea-level. Tippett travelled frequently in the hopes of finding his savior and hoping Jesus would forgive him for all the sins he had committed in his youth. Mapping the places he travelled shows how important Jesus was in his life as most of his travels were for his spiritual life. History is complex and with Tippett, it is hard to understand what he is trying to say but it is easy to connect with him.

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/957b3bed615f2cf9a72b460e68b738f8/tippett/index.html” frameborder=”1″ width=”230%” height=”800″]

 

View StoryMapJS

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Blog #4

Blog #4: Markup

We have done different type of reading on the same text and each time, there is more information being extracted. For the markup project, we conducted a very close reading and attempted to identify specific things, such as names, places, dates, events, etc. This project required more collaboration than ones before since we all had to agree on what to tag and what not to. As mentioned by Pierazzo, two readers could have two different interpretations of the same text. To solve this issue, we discussed as a group and formed rules/guidelines using Google Docs on what should and should not be tagged. There were no disputes amongst the group after this. Collaborating on this project was necessary since it helped eliminate the bias of having only one person work on the whole project.

The close reading required for this project allowed me to see more details about Samuel Tippett’s life. An important event in his life is his father’s death when he is young. This helps as readers understand Tippett even more. It also allows us to look at other people who were a part of his life, locations he travelled throughout his life and how he conveyed his emotions. We went more in depth during this project than we did during the initial transcription, as the transcription was just a private edition. This markup publication helps us get closer to the diplomatic edition that was mentioned in the reading, where we try to recreate and digitalize the initial text. It is not yet a perfect diplomatic as it is missing many of the ‘facts’ but it provides much more than the raw texts that comes with just transcribing and we have the option to change the codes of the XML file to make it look similar to the original text.

Going through the text word by word to determine the markup necessary then reading the context of that specific word, phrase or sentence helps us engage with the text. It is not just mindless reading, we actually had to engage with the text to figure out what needed to be tagged and what did not. The most difficult part of this project was deciding what to tag, such as do we mark any of pronouns that refer to God or Jesus as a person name, we decided not to. There were emotions and events that our group deemed too vague to be tagged. After marking up the texts, we compiled it as an HTML file, making it look similar to a webpage.

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Blog #3 contextual research

Tippett Timeline

Creating the timeline of the life of Samuel Tippett helped us understand the important aspects of his life and how the earlier part of his life impacted him later on. As Grafton mentioned, a timeline helps filter out facts and the important parts of history. And creating a timeline allowed us to see the most important parts of Tippett’s life, through a broader view. We were able to determine why he started becoming religious, what caused it. Although Tippett was not clear about the dates, we tried our best to estimate the dates.

Beginning of the timeline (click on the picture to view the timeline)

The process of doing the Timeline.js project was fairly easy. Although it is not extremely detailed, it does have a lot of information on Tippett’s life. For example, it allows us to see quickly when he started following Jesus and when he went to Kingswood, when did he travel. We include a map in our timeline as it shows the important places Tippett travelled throughout his life.

Just as printing allowed timelines to grow in the 1800s, this website allowed us to use the technology we have today to develop it even further. We were able to add pictures, add events between and much more. Our timeline was more than a line, it allowed us to tell the story of Tippett in a different mode of presentation.

Looking at a timeline, in complement to pure reading helps pick out the important dates, important years in history. There were details we wanted to include in the timeline but they were not important to Tippett’s story. There were some details that were not clear enough, so we could not include them. His father died when he was young but he does not say where or when. As Grafton said, the timeline let us pick precise facts and plot it in a line and observe how one influences the others. We can see Tippett’s early childhood, especially working at the coalpit has a huge impact in his future as he referred to it multiple times.

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Blog #2

Blog #2: Samuel Tippett

In this group project, we transcribed the writing of Samuel Tippett. Below is a summary of his writing.

Samuel Tippett was born in year 1711 in Bitton. From his mentions of wanting to die, he appears to be depressed. He mentions that he wishes he had died earlier in life and talks about how he will go to hell. His father died from alcohol consumption when he was young, and he was raised by a single mother. His mother was strict on him but allowed him to go play with other boys. He lied and said nasty words when he was young. He regrets not practicing religion when he was younger as it could have helped him become a better person from the beginning. When he was 10 years old, he got more and more corrupt as he started working at a coal pit. His mother wanted him to become an apprentice, but he did not want to leave. Tippett got married in 1736 and had eleven children. He went to Hannam Mount and learned from a preacher that Jesus Christ would accept and forgive anyone, including sinners like him. He started fasting multiple times each week and prayed about a dozen times each day in the name of Jesus. He saw Christ not only as his savior but also his best friend, making complaints to him. He saw himself as having no friends other than Christ as He was the only person that could satisfy his poor heart. He became a part of a group that would gather and pray. He had found happiness in religion. Tippett spent a lot of time with his family as he grew older. He still prayed daily but wanted to be closer to Christ, he needed Christ as his life drew closer to an end. He needed his best friend and wanted to spend the rest of his time with Him.

Religion and faith gave Tippett hope in life. Before he turned to religion, he saw himself as a bad person, a sinner, someone who deserved to go to hell. Once he started praying, once he turned to Christ, he saw himself as a much better person than he used to be. His faith gave him a new perspective in life. If Jesus could forgive someone with such a poor heart as him, then maybe his life was worth living. He wished he was born in the time of Jesus as he would do anything even die for Him. Religion allowed him to be a new much happier and a better person.

Since he did not use any periods, we were unable to correctly examine how many sentences he had but his vocabulary density is 0.209, meaning he used 2 unique words for every 10 words he wrote. His total word count came to be about 3,800 words. Since he did not continue his education, he does make many spelling mistakes. Using Voyant and the tools it provides, we were able to do distant reading that Whitley talked about. We are able to analyze words like we would numbers and data. We were able to use it to do spatial reading where we could find words and phrases and the patterns between them. This helped determine what Tippett’s intention and overall tone was for the writing. We used these digital tools to complement the old text to gain an understanding on the writing.

Click on the picture to view the Cirrus

Through this Cirrus, we can see that a few of his most frequent words are heart, times, time, love, Jesus and poor. As with most transcription done in class, it is not surprising that Jesus fell into this list. We know that Tippett became a religious man and changed himself. This tool just allows us to see his other most frequent words.

Click on the image to view the Collocates

The Collocates tool allows us to see words that were connected and most frequently used in the range of each other. He used “poor” and “heart” together many times to refer to himself. He used “love” and “Jesus” to show that he loved Jesus and in return he knew Jesus loved him, no matter how much he had sinned in the past.

Click on the image to view the Trends

If we look at this relative frequency trend, we can see similar patterns to ones we see in the two previous tools. We see that soon after he starts using “Jesus” or “Christ”, he starts to use “love”. We can see the trends of the frequency of the most frequent words. His usage of “time” or “times” does not appear to correlate with other words most frequent words, but they do appear with less used words.

We transcribed Samuel Tippett’s writing and digitalized it. Using this digital edition of the writing, we analyzed it to conclude that turning to religion turned Tippett’s life around. He became a happier person and seemed to have found a purpose in life being a follower of Christ.