Linn

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!

Where’s James Merill Linn? Mapping Linn in New Bern, NC

December 9, 2016 by Maureen Maclean

My role in this project was to spatially markup James Merill Linn’s journal entries from March 23- April 19, 1862, using ArcGIS online. Using the transcribed journal entries and historical research, I plotted, on various maps from the Civil War era, points where Linn mentioned he had gone for each of his journal entries (one point= one journal entry). Most of the points are around the New Bern area in North Carolina, where Linn spent most of his time (March 23- April 9, April 12-16, 1862) as part of the Union occupation of the town under General Burnside. On April 17, 1862, Linn and other Union troops left New Bern for South Mills in a (failed) effort to undermine Confederate transportation schemes by destroying the Dismal Swamp Canal locks. The Battle of South Mills (April 19, 1862) was one of only a few Union defeats as part of Burnside’s Expedition.

One of the hardest parts of mapping Linn was the fact that Linn rarely named the places he visited or the streets that they are on. For example, he mentions General Burnside’s headquarters as a white house in New Bern but doesn’t explain where it is or what the house was called. To find out what house it was so I could map it I had to do some research online. I figured out that the house was the Stanly House. However, the house was moved from its original location in the 1960’s and I couldn’t figure out where the house was originally located. I eventually found the general area where the house first was located after going through old land deeds but I hit another pitfall because the Stanly House isn’t listed on the map I was plotting the points on from 1866. The only building mentioned where the house was first located was listed as the Washington Hotel on the map. After even more research, I discovered that George Washington stayed at the Stanly house in 1770 and surmised that the map maker was referring to this moment in time when labeling the map.

General Burnside's headquarters at Stanly House. — General Burnside’s headquarters at Stanly House.

My struggle to find Gen. Burnside’s headquarters was probably one of my easier efforts to find a location Linn talks about because at least it is a physical landmark. For a lot of the journal entries, Linn just talks about his time at camp yet he doesn’t give the name of the camp he stays at and only offers hints of the general location. I used his hints, research, and the maps (both the 1866 and 1864 maps) to try to locate the camps he stayed at to the best of my ability. For example, on April 3, 1862 Linn mentions moving camp to be on the other side of the river (the two previous camps were on the south bank of the Trent) on the west side of town. Using a map from a newspaper article from that time, I surmised that the camp was located north of the Railroad Depot. Unfortunately, I cannot be entirely sure that the locations I plotted for Linn’s time at the camps, or for any of the points for that matter, are correct. That being said, my spatial analysis is more of a communication device than a historical record of Linn’s location; the purpose of mapping Linn’s entries is to provide an engaging interface for readers to contextualize Linn’s situation. A large part of this goal is aesthetics and accessibility, two key elements of effective communication. To make the analysis clear and good looking, I colored coded elements as well as labeled them. For example, instead of tracking Linn’s travels within New Bern, I instead just used a blue circle to indicate the general area he traversed during the majority of this time and labeled it as so. I figured that if I tried to track his moves around the city, like I did with his journey to South Mills and Pollocksville, it would be too cluttered and visually overwhelming. Additionally, instead of including the whole transcribed entry for each point, I instead only included a quote from the entry that related to the location of the pin. I did this because 1) it is more clean and concise and 2) it makes the reader want to find out more and thus click the link to read the full entry.

Newspaper map I used to help determine where on of the camps Linn stayed at was located. The red circle marks the label of a camp according to the map maker.

Entry that Linn talks about the camp. I used the context that Linn supplied with additional research (like the newspaper map) to determine the location of the camp.

Overall, I am satisfied with the work I did and I think that I was effective in achieving my goals. In terms of relating the process to the other work we did, I think spatial analysis can be considered another form of transcription since I had to transcribe his words in a spacial fashion. Just like with the actual transcription of Linn’s writings, I had to negotiate Linn’s actual words with what I thought Linn meant, or in my case, where Linn meant he was. I had to question Linn’s own accuracy of his locations and use historical research to try to determine where he was. As I mentioned previously, my spatial interpretation of Linn’s entries is just that- an interpretation. This relates back to what Pierazzo says about digital editions:

“We should simply say that the notion of objectivity is not very productive or helpful in the case of transcription and subsequently of diplomatic editions and that we should instead make peace with the fact that we are simply doing our works as scholars when transcribing and preparing a diplomatic edition.” (Pierazzo 466).

Just as I choose what to markup for the various transcription/ TEI work we did this semester, I decided what places I thought were the most important to my edition and used research as well as Linn’s words to spatially markup the entries. As Pierazzo says, we have to distance ourselves from the notion of objective truth- our editions will be inherently subjective and we can’t be stuck on trying to make it “correct.” This is exactly what I did- I adjusted my knowledge and did the best that I could to make a scholarly edition of Linn’s journal entries.

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.

“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.

Creative Commons License