markup

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!

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.

Linns’ Letter

November 17, 2016 by Iris Fu

The first part of this module is to decode Linns’ manuscript. Our group started with a very long James’ letter. In China when teaching English, we learned only Italic in class. Although personally I know some cursive, it’s still very difficult to recognize those words. For example, it’s very difficult to distinguish ‘c’, ‘u’, ‘v’, ‘e’ and ‘o’. It’s hard to tell between ‘b’ and ‘lc’ as well. Sometimes we need to combine with the context to guess what he was writing about. For the later individual part, I got a mostly transcribed letter from James’ brother John to James. Even if I was given the mostly transcribed version, I have no idea why the word is transcribed as such. It will be really interesting to sit in a library and spend all day just try to decode the letter for myself, but as an assignment it becomes a frustrating experience. I tried to get some idea from his other manuscripts, but it didn’t help much.

I love the archive experience. On screen the letter has a pale background, but when I actually looking to the piece in the archive, it’s different. It’s written on a brown/wooden piece of letter paper with lines on it. It was like my answer sheet in high school. Although I cannot fully recognize his hand writing, it’s really beautiful maybe even as an art piece. You can feel the history through the steins and the color of the paper. I think it’s easier to read for me. On the computer screen I always try to magnify the word a little bit more to try to recognized the word, but it’s not helping. In the archive I was even able to recognize a word that I had no idea before. This might be because I was reading the letter as people at that time did, which gives me a sense of the bigger picture of the letter. With a vertical screen, it’s hard to tell which part I was working on, but I can work with the digital version anytime I want though. The more I want to focus, the less information I get.

0002

Since my part of the letter is John’s letter to James, the content is not related to what James wrote in his diary. However, when I was trying to write diaries in elementary school, I would elaborate on who is present, what time the thing is happening and what has happened since diaries are for teachers to read. If the diary is for my own, I would write things less detailed but write more about my feelings at that time. James used a lot of “we” without directly pointing out who the persons are and didn’t say much about his own feeling (it’s like I can’t feel his emotion from his words) but more about what has happened may suggest the audience of this diary might not be his future self.

For me, I’ve never heard about Linn before this mark up, and knew very little about American history. Doing those markups and transcriptions makes me feel like I was part of it, like his family or acquaintance from Lewisburg was reading the letter he wrote from the front line.

TEI – Text Analysis and Data Management

November 2, 2016 by Jingya Wu

This module is about text markup and data storing using TEI. The “language” TEI is new to me, and I had a surprising moment when I first got to understand the real difference between TEI and HTML, and also other traditional programming languages like Python. In my mind, TEI is more like a format of storing information (text and data). It is more like JSON than like Python or Javascript.

As I became familiar with TEI through the exercises (Poe and Declaration of Independence), I discovered that TEI does make the texts to be clearer to me and help me understand the subject a lot better. As a Computer Science major, I did not like reading, especially close reading. Most of the time I found close reading a big headache. However, text is a very important source for analyzing other people’s work, “we have access to a work only through its texts, which serve as the basis for our readings and interpretations (Rasmussen 122)”. The TEI markup process made the reading process a totally different experience for me. For the Poe markup assignment, as I was paying close attention to the different semantic categories of the phrases used in a text, I also got a deep understanding of the tone of the segment, which I don’t think I can gain as naturally without the usage of TEI. In my markup, I used state tags to distinguish different mood of the character as he was being tortured, and assigned different types of states (sensation, action, and also despair because of the amount of despair mood that the author used for the character). Then, I used traits tags for the adjectives that I found particularly important in understanding the threatening and bloody tone of the text. In addition, I also made markups for objects, places, person names, etc. By using TEI, I have achieved all three levels of reading as described by Rasmussen — “the level of manipulation, focused on the handling of texts and on their actual acquisition; next the level of comprehension, directed at reading as an understanding of the linguistic text itself; and finally the level of interpretation, in which connections are drawn between the text and other texts that explain it (Rasmussen 128).”

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-8-21-59-pm

(My Poe markup assignment)

The Declaration of Independence exercise was very different, but showed a different perspective of the usage of TEI — data storing, management, and sharing. By researching adding information about a signer of Declaration of Independence, I have completed the process of collecting, storing, managing, and sharing data. My data were collected from the Wikipedia page of the person, stored in the XML file, managed by the tags around each piece of data, and shared to the rest of the class by merging on GitHub. TEI is not only a clean way to store and manage data, but also makes the sharing and collaborating process much easier.

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(My Declaration of Independence exercise)

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