james merrill linn

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.

Linn: “The Early Years” Revisited by Sarah and Julia

December 9, 2016 by Sarah Rosecky

For our final project, we, Julia and Sarah, worked on previously transcribed diary entries from James Merrill Linn’s 1850 diary. Using Oxygen XML editor, we were able to mark-up the diary entries with TEI. Sarah marked up the first half of the diary, while Julia marked up the second half of the diary. This was an interesting choice because in this class and HUMN 100 we focused on Linn’s diaries and letters from his time in the Civil War. There was so much to mark up in just the diaries we chose, but we decided to focus on the people. We chose to do this because in his letters and diaries about the Civil War, he did not write about many people very often.

Our work is an interesting addition to the Linn project that the whole class is working on. The majority of the project is on his time fighting in the Civil War, but we wanted to add a different aspect to it. People who look at our website need to realize that this man is not just a Civil War veteran! He grew up in Lewisburg, and graduated from Bucknell. He had a life before he fought in the Civil War. Some people may think that his life during the war was much more interesting, but his life before was intriguing as well.

We extensively marked up his diary of 1850, while also becoming more and more interested as we dug deeper into the analysis. We noticed a couple disturbing stories that Linn wrote about, including a murder of a baby. Also, Linn documented much of his social life, which was an amazing opportunity to learn more about the social life of people our age during the 1850’s. One of the recurrent themes that Linn wrote about that was similar to his Civil War diary is his meticulous attention to the weather and its documentation in the diary. Linn never fails to write about the weather happening wherever he is. Another aspect that we became more aware of was Linn’s preoccupation with other religions. We are not exactly sure what religion, if any, that Linn identifies with; however, Linn writes about his experiences at many different religious affiliations, including Methodist and Presbyterian meetings.

Of course, subsequent “7” became easier to identify. Another aspect of the project that posed some difficulty to us was that the original transcribers failed to produce dates for the entries. After some digging up into the original documents, we were able to identify the dates for the diary entries. Shown in the image, we were originally using transcribed material that was lacking in dates and line breaks.

Space indicates where diary entry/ date started

We seemed to work really well on this project. We are both familiar with James Merrill Linn through our first DH class and each of our independent study projects. We tended to agree on the types of semantic markup that we wanted to do, and our interest level in Linn is very similar. We think that our joint markup of Linn’s 1850 diary was a success.

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.

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