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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.

The Linn Letter Process

November 18, 2016 by Dale Hartman

All of the transcription we have done in this unit has been very much a collaborative effort. From the very first transcription activity we did, there wouldn’t have been much progress made had we been working alone and isolated. More sets of eyes looking at a single line is one of the best ways to speed up the transcription process. A lot of words can be recognized with just a simple look-over, but some words are more challenging to interpret. The best method I’ve found for these words is to go through one character at a time and try to compare and transcribe each letter. Generally, these problematic words arise when the start or the end of a word are hard to read, so getting the other part and making an educated guess is also a valid strategy.

The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI

There were a number of advantages to working with the actual documents in the Bucknell Archives. The simple black and white scans we were using as the source of our transcriptions lost a lot of details that were in the original letters. For instance, one word that was giving me trouble in the scanned document was something that looked like it should have been ‘had,’ but had way too many lines to be those three letters. When I finally got to look at that part of the document in the archive, it became apparent that the word was indeed ‘had,’ but Linn had originally written ‘were’ there first, and changed the word to ‘had’ by writing over it. This intricacy was lost in the monochrome black scan we were originally working with. However, the processing that went into creating the digital scan did help to pull better information than the human eye could. It’s easy to see bleed-through on the physical document, which made some words harder to read. However, in the scan, this bleed-through was filtered out.

Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.

A lot of what Linn writes about in the March 2nd letter and journal entry are the same, the visit from Morris, learning of the occupation of Nashville, Memphis, and Savannah, etc. He even describes these events in nearly the exact same words in both the letter and the journal. However, in his journal, he noted that the instructions from Morris were against army orders. This is not something he notified his brother of. He also spent more time in his journal complaining about the little irritations of everyday life (poor weather, broken kitchen equipment). In his letter home, he spent more time discussing the state of the war and world overall, talking about US relations with the Rebels, England, and Mexico.

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.

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