For our final project in this class, we were assigned to construct the design of a website and input all information involving our memoir that we have gathered this semester that helps us answer our research question. For my group’s memoir, Elizabeth Grundy, we formulated a research question around the women’s religion and family – were there different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to church in Moravian lives?
The Memoir section is primarily focused on how we comprised the initial electronic writings of Elizabeth Grundy. The effort that went into careful identification of words in the first few pages because by the fourth or fifth page most of our group had mastered it. The most difficult part of this was trying to identify some names of people or places. Unlike Professor Faull, my group was not well versed in the locations in Northern England so we messed up a lot of place names when transcribing. Once we electronically transcribed Grundy’s memoir, we were able to transport it into a TEI file to dive deeper into the life of Elizabeth Grundy. With a TEI file comprised of the entire memoir, we began to mark it up by tagging words or phrases in the writing that we thought would be important: placeNames, persNames(person names), roleNames, objects, health, emotions, and events. All of this work did not help us answer our research question, but it was the first, and most important, step to do so.
Before we marked up our TEI file, we made a copy in a electronic document of our completed memoir to use for Voyant Tools. Voyant is a text analyzer that allows users to interact with their data digitally and also what my group used to gather the data found under the Visualizations tab. Voyant gives access to an extensive amount of tools that allows you to analyze your documents. Two key tools my group used in our analysis of Grundy’s memoir were Trends and Word Tree. Trends is a visualization that displays the frequencies of certain terms within a document whereas Word Tree shows the collocates of certain words. These tools gave us our first data to answer our research question because they help us, “perceive patterns in data that we may have otherwise missed”(Whitley, 187). Trends showed us that the words Grundy used most frequently were “savior”, ”jesus”, “god”, and “son” and Word Tree showed us that the first three terms were used in very religious ways(“dear savior”, “my savior”) and that the most used collocate for “son” is “my”, which means she loves to talk about her son. This helps us understand that while Grundy does pledge herself highly towards religion, she still loves her family a great amount.
Two more tabs that are visualizations but we considered to have more information are the Story Map tab and the Timeline tab. These two both engage users much more in the geospatial visual that Bodenheimer
believes in. This geospatial elements is a, “complex relativistic view of space [that] has reinvigorated geography”(14). The timeline and story map help a lot with the understanding of this geospatial element. When I was writing and reading Grundy’s memoir, I never actually considered where or when it was all happening. This element actually helps me answer our research question. Based on our story map and timeline, we can tell that Grundy did move away from her family and her kids to be more involved with her faith. However, it’s not like she left the country to somewhere remote; she stayed very close to where her family lived. She even visited her daughter at certain times – one being when she gave birth and sadly passed away. This helps my group understand that even though Grundy’s allegiance to faith was very important, she still wanted to be close to her family. This would have been something I would not have pieced together had it not been for the timeline and story map.
The final tab we worked on was Moravian Women. In my opinion, this was one of the most interesting tabs because I got to read about other Moravian women other than Elizabeth Grundy. For this section, I went a read a lot of sections of different women from Professor Faull’s book: Moravian Women’s Memoirs. Of the few sections that were available for free, I was able to read about some single and married Moravian women. This was perfect because Grundy was a widow so, in total, I was able to read about three different types of Moravian women. This gave me so much information to work with. The single women I read about were Maria Barbara Horn and Eva Lanius. Horn was completely involved in the Single Sisters and devoted her entire life to it – she moved to America because her Savior wanted her to. It was much different for Lanius: when she was rejected she began to live her life normally. A direct quote from Lanius after she was rejected from the Congregation in Bethlehem was that she, “began to like the world again.” Yet once Lanius got later accepted into the Congregation, her faith was rekindled. This showed me that if a woman was allowed the chance to join the Congregation, then her life was 100% committed to her faith, yet if she wasn’t, then she was more committed to family. For the married woman I read about,Johanette Maria Ettwein, her situation was a little different. She was married to a brother of the church so her family and faith were connected. Ettwein could live happily with her husband and serve her Congregation at the same time. 
Something I did not include in the website but I found interesting, was some reports of Moravian men on Professor Faull’s website (katiefaull.com). One of the ones I looked over was of Johannes Jungman. When he was younger, his allegiance was completely to family; he did everything with his family and everything his father wanted him to do, including moving to America, helping with his father’s distillery, and learning copper works. After nearly losing his leg when his sister burned it with brandy, he decided to meet up with his neighbors who happened to be brothers of the Church. They got him to move to Bethlehem, ditching his family to join the Congregation. This gives us another source for Moravian lives and different allegiances to family and faith. In his early years, Jungman loved his family and did everything he could to help, but eventually moved on to give full love to his Savior.
Overall, we found many different relationships between the allegiance to faith and the allegiance to family in Moravian lives. For some, their entire life revolves around the Congregation and for others they grow up until they realize what they truly believe in. All of our Voyant tools and geospatial visualizations helped us understand these relationships. When we started this semester, I had no idea what to expect of this class, but it turned out to be a very in depth and interesting course.
http://grundyhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/
Mitch Gavars is a student at Bucknell University where he is a part of the swim team. Mitch is from Barrington, IL and has one sister. His favorite movie is Aladdin.
