Tag: transcription

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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

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

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.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

I never thought that just transcribing a document would make you understand the story of the person that wrote the it. While writing, the only thing you focus on is what each individual words is, and nothing about the author. For five pages, I struggled to read cursive because I have not seen the style in years. I had to look over the cheat sheets for cursive letters once we started because I just could not remember what some of the letters looked like. In the moment, you don’t really care what the person is saying, you are just trying to figure out what each word is. After finishing my five pages, with lots of question marks, I then had to go back and get help from others. Sometimes, it is just about asking the right person. Some people might know a lot more cursive than others. For example, in our group Meg Koczur remembered her cursive very well so I would ask her for help a lot. Then once you are finally done nitpicking words, you can reread your work to double check everything. Once you get to this point is when you really begin to feel a connection with the author. It is so interesting that none of these documents have never been written so we are the first ones to actually read it. They are just simple documents in which people talk about experiences they had. In Elizabeth Grundy’s work, some of the times she was just talking about some of her dreams. It just made me overjoyed to be able to read about somebody else’s life. Coming into this class, I did not really know what to expect from digital humanities, but this really changed my mind for the better.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nv-N7N0rR6puaTNT2_QHv_918cxgYppQjCQikAxSNqQ/edit?usp=sharing