Reflection #3 – Page 2

The Linn Letter Process

November 18, 2016 by Dale Hartman

All of the transcription we have done in this unit has been very much a collaborative effort. From the very first transcription activity we did, there wouldn’t have been much progress made had we been working alone and isolated. More sets of eyes looking at a single line is one of the best ways to speed up the transcription process. A lot of words can be recognized with just a simple look-over, but some words are more challenging to interpret. The best method I’ve found for these words is to go through one character at a time and try to compare and transcribe each letter. Generally, these problematic words arise when the start or the end of a word are hard to read, so getting the other part and making an educated guess is also a valid strategy.

The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI

There were a number of advantages to working with the actual documents in the Bucknell Archives. The simple black and white scans we were using as the source of our transcriptions lost a lot of details that were in the original letters. For instance, one word that was giving me trouble in the scanned document was something that looked like it should have been ‘had,’ but had way too many lines to be those three letters. When I finally got to look at that part of the document in the archive, it became apparent that the word was indeed ‘had,’ but Linn had originally written ‘were’ there first, and changed the word to ‘had’ by writing over it. This intricacy was lost in the monochrome black scan we were originally working with. However, the processing that went into creating the digital scan did help to pull better information than the human eye could. It’s easy to see bleed-through on the physical document, which made some words harder to read. However, in the scan, this bleed-through was filtered out.

Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.

A lot of what Linn writes about in the March 2nd letter and journal entry are the same, the visit from Morris, learning of the occupation of Nashville, Memphis, and Savannah, etc. He even describes these events in nearly the exact same words in both the letter and the journal. However, in his journal, he noted that the instructions from Morris were against army orders. This is not something he notified his brother of. He also spent more time in his journal complaining about the little irritations of everyday life (poor weather, broken kitchen equipment). In his letter home, he spent more time discussing the state of the war and world overall, talking about US relations with the Rebels, England, and Mexico.

Linn and Me

November 18, 2016 by PJ Onusconich

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-9-12-17-pm letter_apr26

Although I didn’t do any transcribing of this letter in particular, the transcribing of letters with our teams in class was an incredibly frustrating experience. We were asking each other what we thought each word was and, for the majority of it all, had no idea what Linn’s words said. Having no experience with transcribing before, I can say that it felt like being thrown into a new game on the hardest difficulty while being blindfolded and having to use the controller with your feet. Needless to say, I felt very fortunate to have to transcribe my own letter; however, as I looked at the transcribed letter and compared it to the original, I was actually making out the words much better. This left me with an understanding that transcribing is really just a skill like any other that can be polished through experience. I’m sure if I ever do more in the future it would get less and less frustrating.

Visiting the Archives was a really cool experience. It was almost surreal how much easier it was to read the physical letter as opposed to the digital images of the letter. The words appeared to be so much clearer and using a magnifying glass to enlarge the words proved to be significantly more effective than zooming on a computer screen. As for the tradeoffs of each, obviously it is much more convenient to have the digital version due to its portability, but as already mentioned the quality is decreased. The physical copy is easier to read and clearer, but in order to transcribe, one would have to visit the archives and view the letter. So in the event that one does not have access to the archives, one would have to rely on the digital version for transcription or somehow get in contact with someone that works at the archives to assist with the transcription.

In regards to the topics of Linn’s journal versus this letter, it appears that the people surrounding him are the main subjects of his writing. There is no journal entry after the date of my letter, but as for the one before, he’s describing Captain Shawl and his drunkenness. In the letter I encoded, he writes about all of the men he knew that had died in the previous battle. This small sample of Linn’s writing that I have seems to indicate that he rarely writes regarding himself, which is interesting because he’s writing for himself but not about himself. Also, it feels like Linn’s writing doesn’t carry much emotion with it. Both the way he writes about Captain Shawl and his fallen comrades have very blunt, unemotional tones. It makes me wonder whether he was just an unemotional person or if he simply lacked the skills to fully convey his emotions through his writing.

Marking up Linn

November 18, 2016 by Neil Lin

At the beginning, I signed up for a letter that John Blair Linn wrote to James Merrill Linn, which is extremely scratchy and I have no idea what I have run into until Dr. Jak acki said that letter is untranscribable and then I had to pick up another “easier” one. It, however, made no difference to me but I still appreciated that. I joked with my roommate that I can barely read an article even if it is printed, but now I have to transcribe handwriting written in a war over 150 years ago. For example the word “concubine” which means mistress appears in the letter but we do not use it any more. This increases the difficulty of transcribing and also Italic that I am not familiar with. It is incredibly frustrating that made me no way other than to ask the professor for help and I started to focus on markups then. capture

After touching the real letter, I was impressed as preserved so well that I can’t tell it is from 150 years ago if not being told. Personally I prefer the material page rather than the digital one although it doesn’t help that much to me. But when I was looking into the actual page, I could understand why he wrote some letters in specific ways. For example, some letters at the right edge is very squeezed because the paper he wrote on is not a proper rectangle and some part of the paper is destroyed, so we have to guess during transcribing. The material page can always tell more relevant information instead of just text, like smell, texture of paper, ink from the opposite side, etc. However, using material pages can have some disadvantages like that digital one can zoom in much more than a magnifying glass and is more portable. There is only one authentic work for every antique. If I have no access to it, I would email the person in charge of the Archives and ask him or her to look at some words that confused me. Then based on that person’s view, I then decide whether to check it by myself or not
0001 0002

The letter I worked with is James Merrill Linn wrote to his brother John about the the result and the detailed information of a recent battle he took
part in. This is why the former letter he wrote was 6 days before and in that previous letter, he described the weather, clouds, bank of a river and all beautiful and enjoyable nature. While the letter right after 10th of March, on 11th, it aimed to tell John he was safe and no incidents happened that day. Also the letter included more opinion Merrill Linn issued. For example why the battle in North Carolina would be hard to win. What’s more is that he discussed reasons of a southern women association formed which is related to The Emancipation Proclamation that was signed in September. His feeling changed through the letter he wrote from relaxing before a battle, to nervous and anxious because they foresaw a larger battle was waiting for them and this might be the last time for them to hear from home.

“Marking up Linn” experience

November 18, 2016 by Tong Tong

Transcription is the most painful part when I was working on this module. I am very aware how one’s handwriting may include important clues about his/her identity and the situation in which he/she writes. For example, since I haven’t written much English by hand and have not deliberately practiced my calligraphy, it’s easy to tell that I’m a non-native speaking (or writing) person. Therefore, personally I would always prefer to type English and to read printed English articles in order to “conceal my identity” to some extent.

tong_markup — This is a screenshot of my mark-up. You can see that there are many “[?]” and “[…]” which really shows my frustration

tong_pic1 — This is the letter that I transcribed

Since I haven’t read many hand-written manuscripts, I struggled for a long time with the possible spellings and even in the final version, I still have many words unrecognized. When doing transcription, I at first recorded all the letters I could recognize and based on the length of the word, I could have several guesses on what the word might be. The next step would be looking for similar patterns and to decode the letters I didn’t recognize. I would also ask classmates for help; in fact, it would not be roughly finished without Sarah’s help. It is a very frustrating experience and makes me really grateful for the efforts people invest in transforming the manuscripts to the typed paragraph online. If they have not been digitized at all, people like me will have no access to the text because 1) the manuscripts are preserved in certain archives that may not be publicly available and 2) even we can see the picture, we can’t really read it. Therefore, my struggle with transcription also indicates the significance of digital archives and digitized texts.

I work in the special collection/university archive after class, so I’m already familiar with the environment there. Taking a close look to the manuscripts is an important experience, and as Yash suggested in class, the actual paper would give the reader a better overview of the content, while pictures online usually compromised the fluidity of the text as a whole. In some cases, there are some scratches that are only manifest in paper, and the paper’s material is usually absent in pictures as well. For example, I didn’t expect the letters to be so thin and fragile. Though I don’t know what’s the importance of the materiality of the letters yet, but it is possible that the material also carries certain traits of the environment and even of the history.

One thing I noticed by comparing the journal and the letter is that, James Merill Linn is definitely (encouraged to) take the readers’ reaction into account. His brother’s letter on April 2nd is almost solely about people’s reaction to JML’s writing. I assume that readers’ response is important in directing how he should render his life in the writing, and what the readers expect to read and are enthusiastic about. JML mostly talked bout New Berne from March 12th to 24th, and it’s interesting that on April 17th he again mentioned New Berne. One possible guess is that after knowing audience’ response to New Berne, JML feels the necessity to talk more about it.

TEI with JML <3

November 18, 2016 by Sarah Rosecky

Every time I work on TEI, I find something new to challenge me. I worked with TEI, and, specifically, James Merrill Linn two years ago during my first year at Bucknell. As a beginner in all aspects of the digital world, I was scared by the concept of TEI. What is it? What does it do? Honestly, until now I have realized the importance of transcription and text analysis. Over two hundred years ago, there was a man from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania writing from a ship in the Atlantic back to his hometown. James Merrill Linn fought for this country, so I feel a great need respect and honor him and his work through my dedication to this project. In order to do a successful job on an assignment like this, one needs to learn correct transcription skills and semantic markup.

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-7-14-24-pm — Smudgy handwriting

There are multiple reasons that make Linn’s letters hard to read. The first is that these letters were written in the 1860s; the language and style of writing is not so prevalent today. The second is that after over 150 years, the ink and quality of the papers starts to deteriorate. While the Bucknell archives do a great job conserving these artifacts, it naturally happens. On my particular letter, on March 5, from Linn to his father, or Papa as he calls him, there was a large section that had smudged. It was on the bottom right corner of the letter, and it was illegible to read some of the handwriting. Another thing to note is that Linn tends to use patterns in his writing, i.e., the ampersand, but I could not justify what these words were.

Something else that was very useful to us was the use of the Bucknell archives. I was able to see much more clearly his handwriting when it was in front of my own eyes rather than a computer screen. I actually loved using the magnifying glass to see his handwriting. It is amazing how Linn actually had written and touched those letters during the civil war!

After the original transcription, we marked up the text using TEI. This gives the letter some semantic meaning. People, places, events, etc. are categorized according to the critical judgments of the specific TEI editor. For example, is a ship a placeName or a objectType? I will always argue that it is a place Name, because Linn writes from it. The letters will be cited from the Cossack, which is a ship that Linn occupied during the war. He resided in this ship; therefore, I think it is a p

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-7-14-41-pm — Linn writing from Cossack

lace. Others may not feel the same way, and they may want to mark this as a objectType; this is why TEI can create some lively discussions. It is somewhat subjective. Also, when Linn writes to his family, he tends to write differently than if he is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle. If he is writing to his father, he will talk about his well-being, while, if he is writing to his brother, he will talk about sending home guns. If Linn is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle, he seems to write more formally about events; he knows there may be a bigger audience, which may be why his writings become more objective.

Once the TEI markup was completed, we transformed it into an HTML format to be able to publish it digitally. This is a part where I struggled, because I am not as familiar with HTML as I would have liked. It was confusing to me how this worked and why it had to be done the way it was. Ultimately, I am satisfied with the end results of Module 3, because I know, or hope, James Merrill Linn would be proud.

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