Tag: Visualization

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Blog #3 Contextual Research

Chronology of events matters when we are representing history especially through a timeline. Chronology refers to the arrangement of events or dates in the order of their occurrence. It is a very efficient and effective way of organizing events, especially on a timeline. It matters because it shows how history changed over time and is an easy way to analyze past events, compare them with newer events, and infer what may happen in the future. We can represent history on a time line through small descriptions with the date describing an event as well as some sort of media to help the reader visualize the event. Chronology can mean something to different to everyone. For example, chronology for Christians was vital in celebrating many religious holidays such as when to celebrate Easter and knowing that the Apocalypse was nigh.

According to “Cartographies of Time”, timelines have not always been a part of studying history. In fact, there is a history itself in studying timelines. Many people forget that we have not always had timelines as a tool to represent history. In the process of compiling media for my entry (Samuel Tippet) for the Moravian Lives Timeline, I have come to terms with the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation. Both through words and media such as photographs, it has represented and “clarified” historical events. The description describing what has happened while the photograph can give more insight to where it happened, what it looked like, the time period and much more. “Traditional chronographic forms performed both rote historical work and heavy conceptual lifting. They assembled, selected, and organized diverse bits of historical information in the form of dated list. And the chronologies of a given period may tell us as much about its visions of past and future as do its historical narratives.” (Grafton  11) In the first timelines assembled, there were a list of dates. However, many of these dates were missing the events that coincided with them.

A line or timeline tells more than chronology. It tells a story. Since the first timelines were created, a lot of pieces were missing.  Transcribing artifacts as we have been doing in class can help add more information and piece together certain events in history. A ‘line’ has appeared everywhere. Its presence is everywhere. It is used to describe so many different aspects and subjects. For example, in history textbooks or even an analog clock. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have argued that the linear metaphor is even at work in a digital clock, though no line is actually present.

Focusing on my group’s timeline (Samuel Tippet), he was a very dark soul and pretty religious later in life. Samuel Tippet’s life is in England during the early to mid 18th century. He was born in the parish of Britton. Throughout his life, he turned to God and religion after self-reflecting on his naughty childhood.  To highlight one event, in 1754, the Disciple came to Bristol. This is when Tippet pledged his allegiance to God and used this time period to emphasize and explain why religion was so important to him. The Disciple later moved back to London. Another example following 1754 is the next year where it is a defining moment in Tippet’s life. He feels as if he was in the presence of the Lord himself. Throughout our timeline, we include both photographs that help the reader depict what his life was like and the geography of England as well as what the parishes looked like. Our timeline gives background to his occupation, birth, and other additional facts. The two modes have clarified historical events by visual and conceptual analysis. Looking at media as well as reading the description in a time like order gives the best sense to Samuel Tippet’s life.

Attached is my group’s timeline preview link.

https://timeline.knightlab.com/#preview-embed

 

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Blog #2

Blog #2

Research Question: How do the frequent terms within voyant relate to the theme of John Willey’s memoir?

 

The memoir Rosemary, Jacob, and I transcribed is written by John Willey’s children after his death. Willey was a honorable servant of the Lord in the Brn Church. Willey comes from a religious family; his father, brothers, and himself all held active roles in the Church. Unfortunately, John Willey’s mother passed away when he was just six years old. But Willey’s courage and love allowed him to still live a great and loving life. Willey’s eventual passion for religion at 21 years old gave him the faith and love for something greater than himself. Willey attended and taught at religious schools, growing love for his pupils. Eventually, Willey was given the honor of becoming a minister, one of his goals in life. Later, Willey marries a teacher he worked with, named Susan Hutton, whom Willey had four children with. One of his daughters passed away in her early infancy. Despite a long and happy life, Willey suffered through medical issues his last six years prior to death. Most of his vital organs were affected, and Willey was mostly unable to commit to his duty to the church. He maintained a positive outlook on life through his suffering. Willey was still extremely faithful and believed everything would workout well. All he wanted to do was get back to his duty as a minister. The memoir ends with Willey’s family comforting him through song as he passes away. Willey and his family maintain positive up through his death, believing he is leaving his suffering to go be happy with the Lord. Overall, the memoir of John Willey is an excellent story of a man who lived an honorable life as a servant to his Lord, and eventually had his spirits lifted to be with the Lord.

 

The Willey memoir consists of 3,519 words in total. Of those words, 1,106 were described as unique word forms, displaying the complexity of Willey’s texts. Additionally, Willey’s memoir seems to have a pretty standard sentence structure to todays writing, considering the average sentence length of 33.5 words. Through using Whitley’s tool described as distant reading, I was able to see the key patterns emerging in Willey’s text. For example, illey’s frequently appearing words are years, time, great, Lord, life, love and Jesus. This leads me to believe that Willey lived a happy life, filled with faith. Through comparing Samuel Tippett’s memoir with Willey’s on voyant, there are some clear patterns emerging across their lives. For example, both these memoirs are filled with religion. Common words emerge, like Lord and savior, clearly portraying both these men’s passions toward religion. Additionally, love is a word appearing in both texts, perhaps showing that their faith towards religion promoted a sense of love in their lives. Overall, through examining Willey’s and Tippett’s texts, and skimming through a bunch more, there is a clear sense of a passion towards religion in these memoirs. This is very interesting, considering the different locations and time periods these men lived their lives.

 

Visualization, is a tool especially prevalent on voyant, which was introduced to me by the Whitley reading. Almost every tool I worked with on voyant has some form of visualization to it. For example, the cirrus is an excellent resource for compiling all the key terms. Then, using collocates is a great way to further examine which of those words often relate to each other. For example, I noticed that great and years often appeared near each other, as well as savior and Lord. This leads me to believe Willey had great years in his life and viewed his Lord as his savior.

 

Through examining voyant tools, as well as reading through the Willey text, my research question was clearly answered. There is a very clear connection between the frequently appearing words, and the common theme of Willey’s memoir. For example, the words like years, great, Lord, love and Jesus all clearly portray that Willey’s life was a happy one filled with religion. This is reflected in my reading, as Willey devoted his life to his religious workings and seemed to be happy with this choice. Willey also used his faith to maintain happiness in his suffering toward the end of his life. Similarly, Whitley explains how human brains are able to easily notice patterns in their reading. Interestingly, voyant tools put all those patterns in one place, allowing me to notice the same themes I picked up on while reading.

 

 

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Blog #2

Blog #2: Distant Reading

The document, Harriett Lees + Family was a memoir about a thirty year old women, Harriett Lees who was born on February 11th, 1811 in Woodford cum Membris, the country of Northhampton. She was a wife to thirteenth brother, William Lees, and a mother of two sons. Her marriage on June 4th, 1838 William Lees sparked and advanced her religious beliefs. She was became a member of the Brn’s Church where she found herself attending regularly. She was extremely religious and believed God “will not lay upon us more than we can bear”. She often quoted the bible throughout her memoir, which was very compelling. Two instance in her life where she demonstrated her spirituality and religious beliefs was when both her brother and sister passed. She was distraught and found that attending chapel was the best way to cope with her sadness. When others recommended staying home instead of attending chapel due to her poor health, she would respond ‘”I am able to go, the Lord blesses any soul more than the effort injures my feeble frame'”. She would attend chapel as long as she had strength. Harriett Lees’s “health was delicate” and “she was often subject to bad colds attended by severe cough” (5). She struggled with her  health through her pilgrimage and two pregnancies, which ultimately led to death.

After transcribing and reading the fascinating text, Harriett Lees + Family, Hailey and I became very interested on the research question, what is the typical language of a married sister in the Moravian church? When responding to our research question, the use of Voyant was useful and helpful. This tool highlighted the most frequent words and phrases in our text, making it easy to see what was of importance. It offered us a way to look deeply into the text and observe what hardships she faced and how she overcame them. Voyant is an efficient and more pleasing way to gain the important information needed from a long text. For example, some words cirrus highlighted were sister, savior, time, strength, church and mourning. With the most frequent words displayed, I was able to make some accusations about the text. For example, with seeing the word strength and time, I was able to understand that Harriett’s health was at stake. I was also able to sense that their was tragic events and her emotions were scattered with seeing the frequent words mourning. And at last, seeing the common words church, God, and Savior demonstrated that Harriett Lees was extremely religious. Voyant is helpful in many other ways as well. For example, Voyant showed me that the Harriett Lees memoir Hailey and I transcribed is 2,099 words and includes 731 unique words, which I found slightly surprisingly.

Voyant was also useful because it featured the key and distinctive terms in the memoir. Hailey and I used the Memoir of Br John Willey to get accurate distinctive words from the Harriet Lee’s Memoir. The words that were displayed include tho, fit, partner, oh, and lee. The one word that is most relevant and of importance to answering our question we proposed is “partner”. The distinctive word “partner” was used when discussing Harriet Lee’s marriage with her husband. This was significant in throughout the memoir when William supported Harriett through her sickness and births of her two children. There marriage was strong and they shared a true love with one another. Voyant helped me make connections and understand the memoir a lot better than I had before.

One of Whitley’s methods I used throughout this process is visualization. Visualizations sparked new ideas and questions about what I was transcribing, which was very fun! Three specific ways I used spatial reading on Voyant was through the tools of cirrus, collocates graphs, and bubbliness, which is shown below. Bubbliness visualizes and distributes the terms in the text, while collocate graphs represent key words that occur in close proximity. Cirrus is another visualization tool that measures the top frequency words of the text. All three ways are a unique way to analyze text.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=df109f8e08232a569e886362ca2e885b

My personal favorite method  I used throughout this process on Voyant is spatial reading. Spatial reading is the “idea that reading and understanding large amounts of texts can be overcome if the information is transformed into a more spatial manner/ representation because it can be explored by our visionary processes (Whitley 194). I find spatial reading very effective and more enjoyable than sequential reading. Another technique I used in this process from Whitley’s reading is distant reading. Distant reading is “the act of stepping back from the text you’re reading and study the “broad patterns that emerge when you consider a wide swath of texts”(188). I started looking at the most frequent words and their contexts, which provided me a lot of important information.

 

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Blog #2

Blog 2-Rosemary Rong

The main idea of the Willey memoir is that a faithful priest named John Wiley spent his whole life to be pray. The memoir which was written by Wiley’s children illustrated Wiley’s early life between 1781 and 1793 as bittersweet as his mother died when he was six. Still, he grew up with teacher Bradley ‘s care and love until he was twelve. Two years later, he learnt a trade in Bedford, where he started to question the world and reflect himself as a man with sinfulness. In order to redeem himself, in 1802, he went to Bristol where he saw the Congregation for the first time in his life.  In 1806, he served as a teacher in Mirfield school. About ten years later, he was married to Sgle. Sr. Susan Hutton, a teacher at Gracehill. After the marriage, the couple had four children and lived happily in Ballinderry. In May 1841, he had a violent attack of influenza in Cootehill. In the hope of recovering from his painful illness, he served the Lord and Saviour more faithfully than ever. During the last year of his life, he spent four months near Bally-Castle and returned to Gracehill in October. His wife and the three of his children assembled around his bed to witness his gentle departure from this world in October 1847.

 

Via Voyant, I compared both the Willey memoir and the Harriett Lees memoir as these two memoirs were composed at the same time period and they are from London archives.  In the perspective of lexical, the Lees memoir was written in plenty of long sentences and its average sentence words is 80.7 while Willey memoir’s average sentence words is 33.4. Noticeably, the vocabulary densities of both texts are at almost the same level, the Lees memoir is 0.348 and the Willey memoir is 0.310. Based on the average sentence words, the author of the Lees memoir obtain more written skills than the author of the Willey memoir. And the vocabulary densities justifies this conclusion. However, we cannot be 100 percent confirmed as the total lengths of these two memoirs are different. In the contrast of the Lees’ 2099 words and 731 unique word forms,  the whole text of Willey memoir consists of 3505 words in total and 1087 unique word forms. Apart from that, the Willey’s five most frequent words are years, time, great, lord and time. Two common words between two memoirs are great and time. “Great” is to express the extent of certain events or someone and “time” is to illustrate a person’s life in the chronical way. In the perspective of key words in Willey memoir, through the termberry screen, five key words are congregation, lord,time, great and life.  The following graphs are generated through Voyant. The first one is collocates graphs, which represents a network graph where keywords in green are shown linked to collocates in maroon according Voyant’s tools help page. For example, the word “year” is related to “laborer,” “spent,” “age,” and “life.”  According to Whitley’s reading, the author expects that readers can read the digital reading in two mode: browse mode and search mode. The Voyant provides various visualizations  so that even if a reader may not be able to read the memoir in details, he/she can grab the gist of a memoir directly from dozens of graphs. The second graph is cirrus. The words are in eye-catching colors to impress readers and arouse readers’s interests to read the memoir.  In the Whitley’s reading, it is said that visualizations are intended neither to stand as definitive interpretations of literary texts nor to provide direct answers to research questions. Rather, the goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inqury. Personally speaking, colorful words assembled together pushes me to inquire this memoir deeper. The third graph is scatterplot. I imputted both the whole memoir and one-third of the memoir that I transcribed and Voyant generated this graph. This graph not only confirms that the whole memoir is written in the same style, but also differentiate the part that I transcribed from the whole. This is significant because the reader can expect what distinctive meanings from each part of the memoir.  It also serves the function of wrestling with questions that close reading alone might otherwise be unable to answer mentioned in Whitley’s reading. If scholars confront the problem of comparing  two similar memoirs, then use this graph is a starting point.