Reflections

Bringing Linn’s Writing into the Digital Age

December 12, 2016 by Dale Hartman

My job for the final project was to design a website that our Linn anthology could live on. Many of my peers went out and did some excellent analysis of Linn’s writings. However, if we keep doing what we have done in the past with our studies on Linn, these works are going to be loosely connected with no real description of what they are or why our study of James Merrill Linn is important. I wanted to make sure that our work could be published in a way that makes it understandable by people outside of our classes.

Before I could do any coding, I needed to generate a diagram of what our site would look like, both at a high-level map view, and a specific page-by-page view. I did this the old-fashioned way, by creating some pencil-and-paper sketches of what elements I thought needed to be included in the site, and how different pages were going to connect to each other. At this stage, I decided that a navigation bar would be the best way to organize all of the sections of our site, providing easy-to-find links to both our editorial comments and content.

Using the online color palette generator at Paletton.com

As I was beginning development of the site, I discovered that color is a very important consideration when doing web design. In the computer science curriculum here at Bucknell, I’ve learned that identifying a bad interface is quite easy, but picking out what’s wrong with it is much more challenging. As someone without much artistic skill, I needed some help when it came to making the website visually pleasing. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools out on the web that provide a number of different services for web developers. The site I primarily used, palleton.com, helps designers generate aesthetic color schemes. I fiddled with the available settings for quite a while until I managed to find a palette that I thought fit our historical research quite well.

Using HTML’s ‘li’ elements and CSS’s built-in classes to create a working navigation bar with a dropdown menu

Another major part of my work was creating the navigation bar that would link all the parts of our site together. To do this, I followed a standard method of turning an HTML list of links into a functioning navigation bar using CSS. In order to create elements that respond to a user’s cursor, I had to use the CSS :hover selector to change the properties of elements whenever the cursor was hovering over it. The most challenging thing to implement was the dropdown menu when navigating to our editorial content. CSS can recognize some classes, such as “dropdown-content,” and automatically apply certain properties to elements of that class without the designer needing to explicitly code it in the stylesheet. Learning to use this built-in dropdown feature, and modify it to work the way I wanted it to, took quite some time. But, the end result greatly benefits the layout of the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m quite happy with what I’ve managed to accomplish in this final project. If I had a bit more time, my next step would probably be to spend time setting up a genuine image gallery, with the ability to scroll through images and open them up in an overlay screen. Using Javascript, I could also automatically populate this gallery with every image in a folder, without needing to explicitly code each one of them in the HTML file. After working on this project, I feel more comfortable with web design, and I look forward for the opportunity to do more work in this field in the future.

Mapping the Battle of Roanoke, From the Personal Perspective of James Merril Linn

December 12, 2016 by ejp013

For my portion of the final project, I worked at mapping Linn’s journal entries from February 12 – March 12, 1862 spatially using arcGIS online. To accomplish this goal, I used a combination of period maps and in-text research to sketch out a basic view of Linn’s travels, and then digitized my results. The section of journal I worked on primarily concerned the Battle of Roanoke Island, and the various logistical work done before and after the battle. Almost all of Linn’s travel by foot occurs on Roanoke Island, as the only other place he visits is Elizabeth City, during a short supply run.

These maps proved incredibly helpful for me, as Lynn mentions many place names that were temporary, or too insignificant to warrant marking on a larger map. Still, even with this help there were numerous locations I was unable to identify. Some of these locations, like the location of the Cossack was approximated to a general area based on other knowledge in the text. Other issues I encountered were some of the fort names, which confused me at first, until I realized that after being taken for the Union, all the forts were renamed. Fort Hugher became Fort Reno, Fort Blanchard became Fort Park, and Fort Bartow became Fort Foster. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t find the location of ‘Fort Russel’, as it wasn’t labeled on the maps, and there were too many generic gun batteries without names to be sure.

In Red: Forts/Gun Batteries/Redoubts. One is most likely the elusive Fort. — In Red: Forts/Gun Batteries/Redoubts. One is most likely the elusive Fort Russel.

The island of Roanoke seems to be fairly small, as after taking it, Lynn traverses it fairly frequently, visiting most it’s various forts and ruins during his time there. Given the closeness of the various points on the island, I thought it would be too hard to read if I put in a line that traced his journey, as I was missing a few points, and he often doubles back and criss-crosses his previous paths. Instead I used the line tool to give a rough approximation of the Ship’s journey, based on the natural landmarks described by Linn, such as Stumpy Point, and Ocracoke Inlet.

Overview of ArcGIS map, showing Linn's journey on the Cossack to Elizabeth City, and the approach to New Berne. — Overview of ArcGIS map, showing Linn’s journey on the Cossack to Elizabeth City, and the approach to New Berne.

The goal of this digital mapping was to provide a potential viewer with an interactive visual to help aid in their spatial understanding. I though this was especially important given the intermittent mentioning of place names like Ashby’s Landing, and Neuse River that are most likely to be unfamiliar to a casual observer. Although it was a little too complicated, I would have liked to incorporate the feature of being able to click on a location, and then going to the place in the journal where the location was referenced. This would have allowed a potential user to gain more access to the surrounding content, as well as providing an excellent way of bringing someone who might just be looking at maps, into reading the actual journal itself.

Closer view of ArcGIS map, showing Roanoke Island

I really enjoyed being able to work on this part of the project, as I have done work with GIS before, and even work with historical GIS, but I have never recreated a map based on primary source data. It was also cool to work with a figure in local history, the rest of whose personal documents exist at the university I go to! I hope this provides a good addition to the site, to be expanded and modified in the future, as I think it is an excellent option for more visual learners, as well as being a cool graphic that can provide a more interactive counterpoint to the text transcriptions.

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.”

A glimpse of battles, trauma and Linn’s sentiments

December 11, 2016 by Tong Tong

For the final project, Matt, Iris and I together have conducted a sentimental analysis based on Linn’s journal, and after combining it with the battles’ dates, we have some very interesting results. Before we started, we have envisioned several plans. For example, I was interested in the relationship between weather and memory/emotion and longed to explore that if weather functioned as an indicator for his emotional states or as a factor contributing to the change in sentiments. Another direction we could go is to analyze the sentiments in the journals as well as those in the letters, and when presenting both emotions from sources in the same visualization, we might find the difference (such as the letter has more positive sentiments and deliberately hides negative sentiments), which is valuable when we think about the audience and the objective of Linn’s writing. I still think that these could be the potential research questions for future plans regarding Linn’s journal. However, due to the limited time available, we finally chose to investigate the change in sentiments in Linn’s letter and its relationship with the battles Linn experienced.

After we determine our research question, we divided the journal into three parts so that everyone can mark up the emotions and share their impressions in the second meeting. I read the first part of the journal which is from the beginning to Feb 18^th. However, we didn’t specify how to mark up and have not standardize our markups until the second meeting. For example, I marked up by words instead of ideas; considering that different readers might have different readings towards the same text, I was very cautious in only marking up the vocabularies that are definitely positive or negative. In addition, even though we made sure that we all used <state> and <note>, I marked up the word like “<state type= “emotion”>pleasant</state> <note>positive</note>.” Later, when we talked to Iris, she told us that it was more convenient for her to extract data if we marked up the text like: “pleasant<state type= “emotion”><note>positive</note></state>.” Therefore, I then cleared up my markup and made sure that it consistent with the rest of the text. Below the is screenshot of my markup (on GitHub):

%e5%b1%8f%e5%b9%95%e6%88%aa%e5%9b%be43 — Figure 1: The highlighted text is my markup. “” is a previous markup, and I’m using the and tag to mark up the “impatient day” in front of it.

Thanks to Iris for making the visualization to illustrate Linn’s changes in sentiments throughout the days. Below is the screenshot of the final visualization:

figure_2 — Figure 2: the screenshot of our visualization with indications of the battles (thanks, Iris!)

Here are the dates for the battles:

Battle of Roanoke Island: February 7-8, 1862 (Union victory)

Battle of New Bern: March 14, 1862 (Union victory)

Battle of South Mills: April 19, 1862 (Confederate victory)

After the first battle, Linn was deeply frustrated even though Union claimed victory. He had recorded in his journal of all the wounded soldiers and dead corpses, and his negative sentiments were also reflected in our graph. Before that, he was usually happy about the beautiful views of nature, and it seems like that he didn’t realize what war would be like. Therefore, he was extremely disillusioned after the first battle in his life. Linn did not write any journals during the second battle. While he seemed to be peaceful, the text suggested that he paid more attention to the details in life, and probably he did not know how to react to the battle that easily and absurdly destroyed the beauty of life. Finally, Linn seemed to be gave due to the loss of the Battle of South Mills. However, based on the journals, we don’t have many details about what happened after April 19^th.

For the future projects, it would be interesting to see if there is any difference in what Linn valued before and after Linn’s experience of battles. Nonetheless, it is clear that he was most disillusioned after participating the first battle, and he did not really know how to cope with the latter battles and the violence he witnessed.

This is an interesting project and it is only a start. I am so happy that I learnt about TEI in this class, which I think is a powerful way to enhance “close reading” as well as to provide data for “distant reading.” I also learnt that standardization is especially important in group projects, and in the end I want to thank my wonderful teammates, Matt and Iris! I hope to see further developments of Linn’s project!

How did Linn feels? Sentiment Analysis on Linn’s Journal

December 11, 2016 by Iris Fu

For the final project, Matt, Tong and I formed a group trying to do sentiment analysis on Linn’s Journal. First, we divided the whole journal into three parts, and each of us marked up the emotion in our assigned part with “positive”, “negative” and “neutral”. We used the tag “state” and “note” to denote the type of emotion like “<state type = ‘emotion’><note>positive</note></state>”. One example in context of how we marked up is shown in the highlighted part below.

markup

Figure 1. Marking up the Journal.

After marking up the journal, we need to find a way to extract all the information and visualize all those data. To do this, I wrote a python class first to read in the text from the file. Then, it’s going to find the first locator in our case is the “<date type = ‘diary’ calendar = ’0000-00-00’>” to extract date information and add to the list if it’s different from the previous one. Since some use space between words and “=” and some don’t, and some use single quotes and some use double quotes, I decided to get rid of those extra details first, therefore I wrote a static method called “findtag” which takes in a tag without the information you’re looking for and outputs a list of tagwords that later can be used as locators in the search. After searching for dates, I’m able to get a list of indices for dates in the text. Here at first I was very confused what information show I record, should it be a list of dates or a list of indices? Although I’m going to need the date information, I can get it easily by using a list comprehension later, but indices are more useful in the second step. After that, I search for the second locators which is “[‘state’, ‘type’, ‘emotion’, ‘note’]” here to get the emotion between dates. The final step for the data processing is to count the number of emotions presented for each period.

pyfile

Figure 2. Extracting Information

I think findInfo in the PTs class can be easily transformed into a tag extraction method. In my way of extracting, the sequence of tags will be preserved. To be notice, the locator has to appear in sequence to successfully locate the information. Also, we can set how many words after the locator is the information we wanted.

The final step is to visualize the information we got. To do this I used a python library called matplotlib. At first I don’t really know how to add tags to x-axis and how to annotate the graph, so I searched online and by trying I found out that I can use xticks and rotation to do what I wanted.

To be notice, there’re no journals for the date of Battle of New Bern, and he didn’t wrote any journal directly after that, so the arrow in the graph is actually pointing to a date before the battle, but in general we can see that Linn is usually in good mood before the battle, but after the battle he usually feels exhausted or just bad since he has a great responsibility on his shoulder but there’re death and injuries around him all the time.

During the final project, I think I’ve learned how to start a work. To begin with, we need to know how we want our product to be, and then we can finish it step by step. Even if there’re only three lines, we cannot plot them if our markup is not standardized. We learned how to communicate with each other and how to coordinate our times. Also, I learned how to learn new techniques by ourselves, since we were not told how should we mark up the emotion and how to annotate the graph in python. If I had more time, I might even consider trying to make my python file into a GUI interfaced information extractor. In general, I think it’s a great final project in which I’ve learned a lot from.

figure_2

Figure 3. Our Final Plot

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