TEI

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.

screen-shot-2016-12-05-at-7-33-20-pm

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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!

“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.

James Merill Linn: the No-Nonsense Weatherman

November 17, 2016 by Maureen Maclean

I have had experience with transcription before but the Linn letters proved to be quite a challenge for me. I had worked on transcription of print material but I did not expect handwriting would be so hard to transcribe. I referred to the transcribed letters we worked on in class in our groups when I was transcribing my letter. I asked people around me what they thought a word was and Prof. Jakacki helped a lot. To make sure I got the spelling of a person’s name right, I looked at the journal and checked. I found that it was easier for me to transcribe if I didn’t look so close up at a word. I actually found that the shorter the word, the harder it was for me to understand/transcribe it. For example, I had that “over” was actually “own” until Prof. Jakacki helped me. However, I had no problem recognizing “acknowledge.”

Side by side comparison of digital version and my xml markup

My first thought when I saw the real life letter was how small the handwriting/letter was. In retrospect, it makes sense as he had to save paper and ink. I didn’t find the real life document to be easier or harder to read than the digital facsimile. There are trade-offs of working with a digital facsimile instead of a real relic. One being that you lose a certain context of the writing. For example, you also lose a certain perspective or sympathy of the author when using a digital copy. With a real life document you get to hold, touch, smell, and etc. as the author would. When holding the Linn letter I kept on imagining myself as Linn writing amidst soldiers at New Bern and looking out at the sunset. With a digital copy, you lose that rich experience. Another reason why its important to have access to the original material is if the digital reproduction is poor. Luckily mine was okay but I know a couple of students had trouble with their digital copies.

That being said, digital facsimiles are helpful because you can resize them, take notes, print them out- where ever and when ever you want. However, using both a digital and original copy are ideal because it provides a rich context (original) while allowing a manipulation of the text (digital). If you only have access to a digital copy you can call the university or organization that has the original and discuss viewing options or access to their mark up or transcriptions. You could talk with an archivist who specializes in the Linn letters or in a particular letter and ask them your questions. You could also research about publications, papers, and projects that have involved the letters and refer to them for transcription help and see if they have good photos of the letter.

Can you find a pattern of expression, emotion, or experience that is the same or different (remember audience – when Linn writes for himself, does he reveal things that are different from when he writes to someone?)

My letter was interesting because in most of James Merill Linn’s letters he does not talk directly to his audience. In terms of content, my letter was straightforward: James wanted John to give money to the listed people, many of whom appear in other letters, such as Beaver. He doesn’t talk about his day at all and just gives John directions to hand out the money he sent with the letter and he asks John to send him back a receipt of the transactions. In Linn’s diary before my letter was dated, he was similarly straightforward but did not address an audience and just talks about the events in his day. He talks about mundane things in his day like the weather or receiving mail- there is not a lot of emotion in the immediate diary entries before the letter. However, farther back (around April 3-6th) Linn wrote in great detail. For example, on April 6th he wrote a lot about the beauty of the town and the surroundings. For example he remarks “There are many fine houses, but the beauty of them is in the large grounds around them and the shrubbery. Roses are blooming, & the lilac & locust are out.” He also laments, throughout his time at New Bern, about how nice the town must have been in the past. He seems generally interested in the history of the place throughout his diaries. Regardless of the unfortunate events around him, he seems to find solace in the beauty of his surroundings and the little things in life (he REALLY likes the weather) and seems to be optimistic. In terms of context, my letter fits into the previous diary entries because James talks about the paymaster- which James wrote about in his diary a couple days before. It also seems as if he had a fair amount of down time at Camp Franklin.

For a short time after my letter, he continues to write sparingly and in a cut and dry manner. He writes about troop movements and his daily military interactions. He also talks about getting sick and is relieved to find out that it isn’t small pox. It is strange that James did not talk about his letter to John in his April 13th entry, since he seems to recount his day so meticulously in his diary. Compared to the diary entries before the letter, the diary entries after have a more sober and anxious tone. This is probably because his unit had learned about the Battle of Corinth and because James was sick and thought he might have small pox. Linn writes less about nice strolls or the beautiful sunset. This makes sense as he was sick and the Union Army had to regroup and reorganize after Corinth.

The general difference between the Linn letter and his diary entries are that in the letter Linn doesn’t waste any time talking about himself or his day- he instead just asks his brother to give money to these people without explaining why. I don’t think he was so frank because he was busy or in a hurry because his hand writing was neat and according to his diary, he had some down time. It’s interesting that he doesn’t share much with his brother while he does go into detail in his diary. Perhaps this is because what Linn was saying is classified information or because the brothers’ relationship wasn’t super warm/close , or maybe they were in contact all the time and would talk about the stuff in the diaries in a different letter. In terms of my own relationship with my sisters, I often find myself only texting them when I have a specific question or thing for them to do for me. In that aspect I can relate to the straight forward letter to John. However, I can also see how it might be dangerous to write about how Gen. Burnside was anxious or the movement of Union troops over the mail.

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