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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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Blog #2

Blog #2

After transcribing and reading our memoir about Elizabeth Grundy, Voyant Tools allowed me and my group to visualize our text in a new fashion. Once we had taken some time to assess our memoir, we came up with a research question stated as: “How does the frequency of the key terms change throughout the document?” As Professor Faull told us in class, most groups have some of the same key terms (savior, god, jesus). So our question was designed to see how and when Elizabeth Grundy decided to use these terms throughout her memoir.

Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir is about her journey through faith as she lost loved ones. The loss of her father, her husband, and her eldest child, all through illness, had her confused about her true beliefs. This helps lead us into the five key terms that were used throughout the entire memoir: ‘savior’ used 34 times; ‘time’ used 18 times; ‘son’ used 17 times; ‘god’ used 16 times; ‘jesus’ used 16 times. This is my first real use of distant reading which Whitley describes as, “looking over the broad patterns of a text.”

The first tool I used to help visualize these terms was Cirrus. Cirrus is a word cloud that visualizes the most frequently used terms in a document.  Even though Cirrus is one of the most common tools of visualization, it plays an important role in distant reading. Cirrus is very useful because not only does it show the five most frequent terms that appear in the Summary tab on Voyant, but also the frequency of other words. This helped us answer our research question because it gave us a nice baseline visualization on the frequency of words in our memoir. 

[iframe style=’width: 424px; height: 294px;’ src=’//voyant-tools.org/tool/Cirrus/?corpus=486449dbc605c4e77ecaa99e423bb935′][/iframe]

 

While Cirrus gives the frequencies of words, StreamGraph works a little differently. Streamgraph is a Voyant tool that depicts the change in frequency of words in a document or corpus. It splits up your text into ‘Document Segments’(the x-axis) and that helps you determine from the graph how often words were used in which segments. “Savior” is the most frequent term in our document and, based on the StreamGraph, it is also the most frequently used word throughout the memoir. What I mean by this is that ‘savior’ was not just used 30 times in one section then forgotten about, it was the most spread out word in the memoir. This Voyant tool helps us answer our research question because it shows the relative frequency of the five most frequent words. With this we can assess how often terms are used in which parts of the memoir. For example, around Document Segment 15, we see that the term “jesus” was used a whole lot of times whereas it was hardly used in the beginning of the text.

[iframe style=’width: 424px; height: 294px;’ src=’//voyant-tools.org/tool/StreamGraph/?docId=c07c78025c913d7a2670603c760ceb25&corpus=486449dbc605c4e77ecaa99e423bb935′][/iframe]

 

Now that we had figured out frequencies and relative frequencies of the key terms, we decided to work a little with their collocates. Using WordTree, we were able to identify how Grundy was using these terms in her memoir. While I was expecting four of the five key terms in our document (savior, god, jesus, and son-because she had two sons), I was a little confused as to why time was one of the key terms. In the WordTree for time, three of the five left continuations are ‘another’,’this’, and ‘any’. With these continuations, Grundy is telling us stories of her life at these instances (another time…, this time…, any time…). This Voyant tool helped us answer our question because it put into perspective how Grundy was using these terms. All of these tools helped us “perceive patterns in data that we may have otherwise missed”(187) and helped guide us along to answer our research question.

[iframe style=’width: 424px; height: 294px;’ src=’//voyant-tools.org/tool/WordTree/?query=savior&corpus=486449dbc605c4e77ecaa99e423bb935′][/iframe]

So while the StreamGraph was the most direct answer to our research question, the Cirrus helped us discover what other terms were frequently used, and the WordTree helped us figure out collocates of the five terms so that we knew the context she used those terms in.

Johanna Drucker defined visualization in the Whitley reading as a way to “integrate interpretation into digitization in a popular way” and I believe that exploring Voyant with our memoir and these tools made for a very enjoyable assignment.

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Blog #2

Blog #2: On Distant Reading

As I previously mentioned in Assignment 1, the Memoir of Harriett Lees was about the life of a woman, Harriett Lees. Lees died on January 17th, 1842 at age thirty and was very sick with a bad cough and lung inflammation up until her death. Faith, the Saviour and the Church were extremely important to her because she was brought up learning the principles of the Church of England. She was born on February 11th, 1811 at the Woodford cum Membris in Northampton county. She often cited the Bible and was very moved by spirituality. Lees lost her brother which was extremely devastating to her. She would go to church often to talk with and pray to him and knew that they would soon be reunited. She was often sick and suffered from bad coughs and lung issues. Specifically, in the spring of 1837, she suffered from lung inflammation and was told to go to Lemington to try the water there, and it helped her temporarily. Lees was married on June 4, 1838 to 13th Brother William Lees of Leominster. After she got married, she was admitted to be a member of the Brn’s Church and became a regular at the Church. The following December, Lees had a son, but became sick again not much later. Near her death, she lost her sister which was devastating to her and caused a lot of anxiety. She continued to work for the church as long as she could and often attended services when she was well enough to do so. She gave birth to a second son and seemed to be feeling well after she had him, but that did not last very long. She continued to decline and was worried how this would effect her baby, but she continued to look to her Saviour for help and support. She stuck with her faith, even until the end and helped those in need as much as she could. She passed away leaving behind a husband, siblings, children, and friends.

The research question Paige and I came up with based off our interest in Harriett Lees’ life was: what is the typical language of a married sister in the Moravian Church?

I believe that using Voyant was very helpful in answering our research question. Voyant highlighted the key terms in the memoir of Harriett Lees which gave us insight on what her life was like and what was important to her. I saw how important the Savior was to her based on how frequently the word “Saviour” was used. I also realized how the women in the choir referred to one another as sister because I saw that the word “sister” was used many times and I was able to see the context it was presented in. After visualizing the data with Voyant, I wanted to learn more about the Moravians and came up with new questions. I want to know what a typical life is of a married sister in the Moravian Church and then I want to be able to compare it to the life of an unmarried woman from the same time period and location and see the differences. These questions that emerged through my use of Voyant stem from Johanna Drucker’s definition of visualization in the Whitley readings. She defined visualization as a tool that can provoke or inspire many questions instead of just answering one specific question.

After putting the text into Voyant, I learned that the Harriett Lees Memoir has 2,099 total words and 731 unique word forms. I find this very interesting because a high percentage of words used were not used more than once showing me that Lees was well-versed and most likely well-educated. Each sentence averaged about 80.7 words, which is also very high and affirms the idea of Lees being educated as a high average sentence length symbolizes a high education level. Another piece of data that Voyant provided me with was that the five most frequently used words (excluding stop words) in Lees’ memoir were: sister, time, savior, great, strength. I feel that because Lees used these words so often, they must have been ideas or things that were of much importance to her, which goes along with my idea that she looked toward her Saviour for strength. The word “sister” was very prevalent because that is what she was referred to by others and what women in the Church referred to one another as. Also because the text is a memoir and she went through major events in her life, it makes sense that “time” was a frequently used word.

In order to get the distinctive words and their collocates from the Harriett Lees memoir, I uploaded the Memoir of Br John Willey into Voyant. I found that the distinctive words in the Lees memoir were: tho, fit, partner, oh, and lees. Out of these five words, “partner” is the most important for my research because it answers the question we proposed. A married Moravian women most often used the word “partner” which makes complete sense. It was used in the context of discussing the relationship between Harriett Lees and her husband. They were very supportive of one another and stood by each other in difficult times. Voyant allowed me to partake in distant reading, a concept from the Whitley reading. Instead of closely reading every text, I looked at the patterns that emerged when comparing the two texts. It made seeing connections easier.

The visualizations I made from Voyant allow me to practice spatial reading, another concept from the Whitley reading. Spatial reading is transforming text into forms that takes advantage of visual perception instead of just using typical sequential reading. It uses patterns and creates “concept shapes.”Here are links to the visualizations I created from the memoir as well as screenshots of the visualizations themselves:

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=sister&query=time&query=saviour&mode=corpus&view=CollocatesGraph

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&view=TextualArc

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=strength&view=TermsBerry

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Blog #2

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).