Reflection #3

James Linn

December 12, 2016 by Matt Fay

The graph above is the culmination of the work that Tong, Iris, and I have done on Linn’s Journals. The red boxes represent a war. The first war was on Feb 7-8 and the Union won, you can see the amount of positive things that Linn wrote spiked on the first day of the battle, which was then followed up with a lot of negative thoughts on the second day of battle. In the time after the battle, there are three days in which there are more negative than positive sentiments. During the down time between the battles, there is not much neutral analysis done by Linn. In the few days before the next battle, there is a spike in negative sentiment, but there is no journals written on the actual battle date of May 14th. After the second battle, there is a spike in neutral analysis, which I take to mean that he is “battle hardened” and is analyzing his situation with less emotion and more factual analysis. In the down time between the second and third battle there is a spike in positive writing from Linn and in the days before there is a boost in both positive and negative emotions which is understandable because there is a battle that he should be getting excited for, but he has seen many people sick and dying and knows that he can be next.

This is a photo from the Journal.xml file that we marked up. In this screenshot, Linn talks about the how someone is hungover from heavy drinking the night before. He also discusses the hardships that he and the battalion are facing. This is a mainly negative excerpt and is a good example of the types of things that we were looking for regarding negative things written by Linn. I worked on marking up the middle section of Linn’s Journal, which contained time after the second battle, which was an interesting time in his journal to analyze. As you can see from the graph, there were many changes in sentiment around this time.

James Merrill Linn the… Cartographer?

December 12, 2016 by ejp013

What I learned most from doing the markup was to get a much clearer picture of the various locations described when I marked up for placeNames. When I first read through the letter, it was difficult to conceptualize in my head where/what every location he referred to was, but as I was doing the markup and cross-referencing to the document, I started comparing the various names with Lynn’s hand drawn map, which helped me visually think about it. I also had to think about how to represent the map in my markup, and while I was interested in perhaps inserting a photo of just the map into my markup, it proved to be a little too difficult, so I ended up just marking spaces every time the writing wrapped around his map.

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Additionally, when I was first skimming the letter I didn’t really get a sense of what he was talking about in a big picture sense, but marking up the various objects and groups (like Carolinians, or Prisoners) I was able to summarize that most of the letter dealt with the after effects of a battle (I believe the battle of Roanoke), and it seems Linn’s regiment was involved with two main tasks, first the housing and care of the prisoners captured, and second, the transporting of supplies up and down the sound. Unfortunately, as I was not able to view the original archive copy, most of the last words before the line break on the 2nd page were illegible, as the document is slightly folded in the photo, which covers up the last part of each line.

Although much of the letter is spent detailing the mundane day to day activities of army life, I enjoyed the few times in which Linn revealed some of his deeper feelings about what he what he was doing. Such as close to the end of the first page when he says “I hope this war will thoroughly disgust Americans with war.” Lynn does his duties with honor and discipline, although he is anything but a mindless soldier. He seems to take most things in stride, always finding the positive things in his life to keep the tone of his letters light, remarking on the subject that “one cannot expect his pathway to be strewn with flowers.”

Linn- Not Exactly a Calligrapher

November 20, 2016 by Matt Fay

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The letter that I was transcribing from James Linn was written to his brother. He writes about his regiment as well as his own feelings that he is experiencing about the war. He also requests more stamps from his brother because he was unable to get them at the time. I notice a general feeling of anxiousness in his letters. He seems like he is awaiting some closure. He outright says that he and his regiment are anxious in my letter. He also seems like he is awaiting closure when he talks of a siege of Camden that his regiment was thanked for.

The first words of the letter were illegible to me until the final day of transcription and there are still many words that I have not been able to transcribe. “I expected” was read to me as “Sephora”. This is a great example of the trouble that was had during the process of transcribing each word. As context built and handwriting patters emerged, more and more words became clear. What also became clear was James Linn’s story.

Using zoom tools on the computer was not enough. We set out to the archives to get another perspective on these letters. Immediately I saw a difference. There was a crisper, more readable letter that I was able to hold in my hands. I was able to lean my head closer or further away to get a better look at a word. I could use a physical magnifying glass to look at each word individually as well as reread the letter a few times to look at the context. One of the biggest discoveries that I made were recognizing words such as “that”, “their”, and “them”. I struggled to identify these words an awful lot until we went into the archive and looked at the physical letters. Once I recognized these words, I was also able to distinguish other words that contained a “th” in it from those that did not.

I think that if the Linn archives were not at Bucknell, I would have had to make a much larger effort to transcribe his letter. I may have had to do some research into handwriting analysis and collaborate with other transcribers to understand the process. The archive allowed me to skip that extra work, which I think is good because it is more efficient to have done it this way because I only needed to transcribe the one letter.

James Merrill Linn: Town Hero

November 19, 2016 by Julia

Fortunately, James Merrill Linn’s handwriting and I share some history, so I did not have as difficult of a time transcribing his writing this time around. I transcribed two letters, one to his brother and one to the Lewisburg Chronicle. I think it is fascinating to have to basically decode a letter in order to read it. I really enjoyed transcribing the letter to the Chronicle in particular because it was different from his journals and letters I had read in the past. While I would consider myself a sufficient subscriber, there were still many words and phrases that were indecipherable. I discovered a range of solutions to my problems. First, I would search the letters I could read into Google. This worked maybe 20% of the time to find the word that I was searching for. This is one example where I screen-shot-2016-11-18-at-8-59-53-pm knew it was a name but could not figure out every letter to get the correct name. So I searched “Beauveyard” into Google, where it suggested searching for “Beauregard” instead. It turns out that he was a famous Southern military officer, and was the first prominent general of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War. Another way I discovered a word was with the help of my peers. They proved incredibly helpful many times because they provided a fresh set of eyes or had seen the same word in their letter. If none of these ways worked I forfeited and marked it up as unreadable.

Thankfully the Linn letters are located in the Archives, because in the end it is helpful to have the option of seeing them in person. I thought it was beneficial to have the option of looking at the physical letter with a magnifying glass, or zooming in on the photo of the letter screen-shot-2016-11-18-at-9-22-52-pm on my computer. I found that both ways were equally helpful. Sometimes the computer image would blur the word too much that I could not see the one line that was necessary to decipher the word. On the other hand, it was helpful to have it on the computer because I could zoom in as close as I wanted. I also liked transcribing from the computer image because I would constantly lose my spot in his letter when looking at in while in the Archives.

Interestingly, the letter that James wrote to the Lewisburg Chronicle is very dissimilar to his journal entry written on the same date. Linn wrote his journal solely for himself, assuming that he would be the only one to read them, so he wrote about his personal experiences, rather than what was going on in the war. His letter to the Lewisburg Chronicle was meant for the whole public to have read. This is why he wrote about where they were going, the Colonels and officers he encountered, and their battles. He wrote about the batteries, the rebels, and the swamps they had to wade through rather than about the weather because that is what the people of Lewisburg would have preferred to read about.

Letter Transcription

November 18, 2016 by Jingya Wu

This is the first time for me to actually read and even to transcribe a manuscript. As a non-native English speaker, it is particular difficult for me to understand the writings. For instance, when I don’t know a word, there is no way for me to figure out the handwriting version of that word. This happened very frequently when my group was doing the first transcription together. In addition, there are many person names and place names, which made the process even harder and more frustrating. During the group transcription, I relied a lot on the other group members, and was obviously slower than how they were moving forward. When I tried to do my own transcription, I had to look back to the transcribed letter that my group did in class and compare to the manuscript to see how he wrote each letter. It was such a pain and thus I decided to use a letter transcribed by Professor Jakacki. The mark-up process was so much better. It helped me a lot to better understand the letter and his writing style, and thus was very helpful for me to understand his experience during the war.

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Being in the Archives changed my first impression on these manuscripts. When I first saw those digital manuscripts, the first word that came to my mind was messy, and I didn’t find their handwritings beautiful at all. However, when I actually got to hold the real letter, I was really surprised by the quality of Merrill’s handwriting. The texture of the paper was decent, and the cursive handwriting was extremely beautiful. I would be way less frustrated with the transcription assignment if I was using the real letter. For me, the real letter is a lot cleaner and easier to read. However, it is not possible to give everyone access to all manuscripts. Therefore, digital copies are necessary to spread the information. If I did not have access to the paper copy, I will try to look for different versions of the digital copy online, since light and scanning technology can really affect the quality of a digital copy.

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In Merrill’s letter, he mentioned that he had a cold which was affecting him a lot. While I was reading Merrill’s journal, I found that he caught the cold on the 25th, which is two days before he wrote the letter. The cold lasted for 4 days. In addition, I also noticed that when he was writing to himself, he included a lot more details than he wrote to others. For example, he mentioned the moss that he picked up when he first landed at Slocum creek in both the letter and his journal of the day. However, in the journal he included a lot more description about the moss, as well as the underlying meaning of this moss — his first encounter with the place.

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