TextualArc – Humanities Now!

Memoir Summary:

Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir is an account of her life, (February 6, 1717 – May 9, 1799) which she dictated to her son. She starts out by talking about her childhood, as far back as she can remember. Her parents were very strict, and were of the Presbyterians persuasion. Elizabeth was the youngest of her sisters, and had no brothers. Her father died when she was twelve which left her mother to care for them alone. Elizabeth became much more involved in religion around this time and practiced it regularly throughout her teenage life. When she was twenty two years old, she started school keeping. Shortly after this she met her husband, who was a member of the church of England, and they had a son together. On February 22, 1748, when her husband was only twenty nine years old, he died. Elizabeth, much like her mother, was now a widow and had to care for her baby son, in the middle of her second pregnancy. She explained how she managed to handle this, by turning to God when she felt overwhelmed, and making sure her children worshipped God to reap his benefits. Her oldest son William died after a long illness when he was seven years old. In 1756, she moved to Dukenfield as a member of the Brethren church, where she eventually started up a school for girls. About ten years later when her youngest son was old enough to live on his own, he left Dukenfield for Fulneck, where he eventually would get married and be asked to start a school for the Brethren society. Elizabeth Grundy also had a daughter, who after her first delivery passed away, and the child died with her. After this she went to live with her son in 1787, and began a school for girls where she lived out the rest of her days worshipping her Savior.

The full compiled transcription that I entered into Voyant is one document that consists of 4,979 total words, and 1,314 unique word forms. The vocabulary density of my group’s document is 0.264, and the average words per sentence in this document is 28.6 words. The five most frequent words in the corpus are savior, time, god, son, and jesus. Savior almost always comes after “our”, and contains either the words god, jesus, or christ before or after it is used. Time usually comes right after a set of words such as “about this”, “at this”, “at any”. God is used mostly around the word “people”. Son almost always comes after the words “her” and “my”, and occasionally “the”. Jesus is often surrounded by the words Christ, Lord, and Savior in this document.

The research question my group and I are investigating is, how does the frequency of key terms change throughout the document?

The first tool I used to visualize my text is called TextualArc. I chose to start with this one because it was mentioned in Whitley’s article, and I wanted to figure out what its purpose was. The creator of this tool W. Bradford Paley, wrote that he wants “to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing”(Whitley, 197). This tool is interactive and as you hover your cursor over all the different words in the ellipse, lines will pop up connecting to its collocates. This ellipse contains every word that is used in the document, and the cloud in the center of the ellipse is a color coated array of the text’s most frequently used words. The words in the middle are used commonly throughout the entire document, while the words on the boundaries of the ellipse are specific to certain segments of the document.

TextualArc is helpful in figuring out which terms in the document are used the most frequently, and throughout the entire text. Without a tool like this, it would be a very long process to figure out the most frequently used terms, and what their collocates are. Which is exactly what Whitley was referring to when he said “the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be”(Whitley, 188).

Word clouds have proven to be quite popular with internet users, both for their playful aesthetic quality and for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts”(Whitley, 198). I like word clouds because of how simple but effective they are. These to me are basically condensed summaries of texts. Instead of writing out a couple paragraphs to explain what happened in a text, you can just look at the most frequently used terms organized randomly, and be able to gain a little bit of insight to what the text was about. Obviously you won’t be able to actually understand any of the details that go on in a text, but it will give you a decent overview of what the text is about.

This graph uses trends to visualize how often the most frequently used terms appear throughout the document. According to the data, the word savior was the most used term in the first two segments of the document, as well as the fifth, sixth, and eighth. Son was the most used word in the third and the tenth segments. God is the most used word in the fourth segment. Time is the most used word in the seventh and ninth segments of the document. This graph directly shows us how the key terms change over the course of the text my group and I created. This answers our research question because its shows us that although savior is the most frequently used word in the document, it is not the most frequently used word in each segment of the document, or throughout the document. It actually changes throughout the document, but the overall highest used word savior. If I was going to try and figure out all of the data by myself without the use of technology, it would mean counting by hand the 4,979 words in the document, and figuring out how many times every word is repeated if it is. It would be extremely tedious and difficult. These tools allow us to create helpful visualizations out of texts very efficiently, and they show us a lot about the relationships between different types words and their frequencies.

Caleb Broughton

Caleb Broughton is an Econ major who plays on the baseball team at Bucknell University. Born in Lebanon, NH on November 6, 1998.

Blog #2

While transcribing my assigned memoir, I paid close attention to every individual word, rather than looking at the document as a whole. However, after my transcription was complete, I was able to read over the document and really pay attention to the actual story of Joesph Lingard’s life. My memoir is mainly about Joesph Lingard and his family and how he found his way into the congregation. The memoir discusses how Joesph and his wife were extremely unhappy and joined the congregation to rid themselves of this unhappiness. At first, Joesph and his family did not have a home near the congregation, so the brethren actually offered his family a place to stay until they found something more permanent. The memoir continues on following Joesph through all steps of his journey into joining the congregation. In the end, Joesph falls ill. As we move forward, I am excited to look more into not only Joesph but his family members, specifically his son, because they were so important in the memoir.\

Edward Whitley writes, “the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be” (188). Whitely is correct in that information visualization tools, such as Voyant, make complex text, like the Moravian memoirs, much more digestible than they might seem at first. Our group research question is: Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian People? This approach has been somewhat helpful in answering our research question, but it certainly doesn’t offer a complete answer. This approach has been helpful in getting a better sense of how the Moravian people viewed the congregation because we have been able to pinpoint where the word congregation has been used and the words surrounding it, as I talk about below.

Using Voyant has allowed me to interact with my assigned memoirs in a new way. TextualArc allowed me to see the flow of keywords throughout my document in a neat visual. This tool painted out a nice overview of the text, and “creat[ed] visual abstractions of textual patterns” (193), which I used before diving into other tools that gave more detailed data. In a way, I used this tool to see a summary of my document. In my opinion, the most helpful tools on Voyant are those that allow you to see the frequency of different words in the text. Both the Cirrus word cloud and Document Terms allowed to see the frequently used terms in two very different, but equally helpful, ways. First, the word cloud emphasizes a frequently used to term by making it larger. Observing my word cloud, I was able to see that congregation, heart, saviour, son, and brethren were most frequently used. I did not find any collocates to be particularly useful because no words were associated with another more than once, so no phrases presented themselves as frequently used in the document. These words allowed me to see that Joesph Lingard’s story of how he joined congregation was more instrumental to the text than I originally thought. However, the Document Terms gives the quantitative data to see how many times each of those words were actually used in the specific document, but not the whole corpus. For example, Document Terms showed that heart was used 18 times throughout the text and showed a trend line. This trend line is an especially helpful visualization tool in that is shows me where in the text the word is used most frequently, which allows me to ask more questions about that particular section of the document. For example, where the word heart is most frequently used, Joesph was speaking about his journey to join the congregation and how the brethren offered him lodging. Joseph’s frequent usage of “heart” shows that these kind actions deeply affected him. Overall, These tools are helpful because “amid the chaos of more frequent repetitions,” the tools allow me to see patterns that I “may have missed with close reading” (191).

Samantha Salazar

Samantha is currently a sophomore Markets, Innovation, and Design major in the Freeman College of Management at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. At Bucknell, Samantha works as a Student Development Officer for the Student Calling Program and is a member of Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society, Women in Finance, and is treasurer for the Chi Mu Chapter of Chi Omega Sorority. She graduated from the Morristown-Beard School in Morristown, New Jersey in June 2017. Samantha resides in Harding, New Jersey and during the summer, Samantha works at Basking Ridge Country Club.