Category: Digging

Categories
Blog #3 Digging

Chronology of events using TimeMapper

Time Mapper is a great visual tool to categorize different historical events and figures in chronological order. Chronology orients the viewer by significant events and time and provides the viewer with a better understanding of more global events. For example, in Linn’s diary, he does not discuss the historical events occurring around him; rather, he gives his own personal account of what is happening to him. Timelines can allow us to look at specific dates in history and compare those global events to the dates and events Linn writes in his diary.

In Grafton’s essay, he discusses different approaches to using timelines effectively. Priestley created a timeline called the Chart of Biography, which indicated dates of the birth and death of historical figures. As a result, he came to the conclusion that “historical narrative is not linear”. Priestley and other theorists believed that a linear timeline does not accurately represent the countless connections and intersections between events and historical figures. Renouvier created a nonlinear timeline showing the different possible events that could have taken place if a different choice was made. Thus, he shows the actual events and hypothetical routes that led to different series of events. Renouvier’s timeline shows great contrast to Priestley’s, as Priestley only depicts factual dates and events in history. Another example of a nonlinear timeline would be Stapledon’s time scales. Stapledon looks at the larger picture by making the timeline across billions of years. This allows Stapledon to make overarching connections between the most significant events. A disadvantage to his time scale would be that he omits events that could have had a large effect on the specific events he chose to include.

Screen Shot 2014-10-05 at 7.18.14 PM
skiing 1862 and Mendeleev’s periodic table 1869

TimeMapper is a useful resource for putting major events in chronological order.
However, it does not give any representation of ideas or correlations between events except for time.For example, if we wanted to see if there was a connection between skiing in 1862 and Mendeleev’s Periodic Table in 1869,
TimeMapper would only show us that those two events are within the same decade. Timelines are helpful to give ourselves an idea of the time period Linn writes his diary, but it does not show relationships and connections between events.

Screen Shot 2014-10-05 at 6.51.26 PM
Beginning of the Civil War before Linn enlists in the war

Linn’s diary entries in winter 1862 discuss the struggles he must face, the daily procedures, encounters with other men, and places he travels to during the Civil War. TimeMapper in the 1860s can give us a better sense of what is happening around Linn while he is writing in his diary.

For example, on April 12, 1861,
the Fall of Fort Sumter occurred was the beginning of the Civil War. Three days later, James Merrill Linn enlisted in the war. TimeMapper gives us an accurate representation of where Linn’s diary entries fall into global events.

Screen Shot 2014-10-05 at 7.16.16 PM
Secession of southern states from the Union after Linn enlists in Civil War

Another example would be the secession of the southern states from the Union,
which happened between June 8 and August 12 of 1861. This was after Linn enlisted in the war and was a time of great instability in the states. The secession of the southern states further increased the tension amongst the north and south. This may have contributed to the challenges Linn faced while writing in his diary.

Categories
Blog #3 Digging

Blog Post #3 Prompt

“On Time”
Due Sunday 10/5 by 11pm
Thinking about how we represent history has been a question that has occupied us for millennia.  Why does chronology of events matter?  What can it show?  How can we represent history? How do we “draw time”?

In “Time and Print,” Grafton observes that “Teachers and theorists claimed, over and over again, that chronology and geography were the two eyes of history: sources of precise, unquestionable information, which introduced order to the apparent chaos of events” (Grafton, p. 17)  At the same time, the author points to Joseph Priestley, the 19th century scientist who believed that “historical narrative is not linear.” (20) So how do we reconcile linear and nonlinear time?

In the process of compiling your entries for the collective 1860s Timemapper and thinking about how time played out for Linn in his diary, how have you come to terms with the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation?  How does graphical representation clarifiy historical events?  Where do we place Linn’s narrative within that representation? Where do the 1860s and Linn’s experience in winter 1862 fit together?

Write a 300-word blog post on this topic.  Include at least three points from Grafton’s essay in your entry and at least two illustrative screen shots from Timemapper that illustrate your argument. Give your post the category “Blog #3” and at least five tags that help you to explain your work.

In addition, choose one of your classmates’ posts and give them feedback in the Comment box. Your comment should be 50-75 words in length and respond to a specific argument that is made in the post. For example, your comment might identify a correlation between your own post and one you see in your classmate’s work; it might introduce to the post’s author a different reading of something they interpreted in the Grafton essay; or it might reflect upon ways in which you both consider Linn’s experience within a larger chronological landscape.

Categories
Digging

Week Five Assignments, Readings, Exercises

Monday 9/29

  • Lab: Timemapper

Wednesday 10/1

  • Discussion: What does time visualization tell us about Linn?

Friday 10/3

  • Close reading module introduced
  • Transcription revised and re-compiled (using marked draft transcriptions)

Sunday 10/5

  • Blog post #3 “On Time” due (11pm)

Categories
Digging

Thinking about Time and Place

One of the things I love about doing historical research is learning about the time in which an event or series of events took place. In my opinion, you cannot consider people or the experiences (or their works) in a vacuum. To me, you can’t study Shakespeare without considering what was going on in England and the world during the reign of Elizabeth I.

The same holds true for how I think we should examine James Merrill Linn’s experience in the Civil War. While he might not always talk about what is going on in the wider world, we know that he was reading newspapers, and that waiting for news from the world beyond the battlefield was what kept him and his fellow soldiers going in what can only be imagined as horrific conditions.

We’re going to spend the next week thinking about the idea of time, and how the events in Linn’s life and in the Civil War more generally played out in the context of the decade of the 1860’s in terms of society, politics, science, technology, literature, and the arts on a global scale.

To do that we’re going to collaborate on the creation of a timeline using a multimedia timeline web-based platform called TimeMapper.

I’ve started a TimeMapper instance for our class, called “1860s Events”. It looks like this:TimeMapper

Your task will be to add event “slides” to this timeline. You will use Wikipedia’s list of events for the decade of the 1860s, add text and images that describe and evoke your event, and geospatial coordinates that will identify that event with a place.[1. A helpful way to find the longitude and latitude for a city, state, province, or country is to call up that place on Wikipedia; in the right sidebar you should see a link for “Coordinates.” Click on those numbers and you will be taken to a “GeoHack” page that provides the correct longitude and latitude.] The one caveat is that you need to find events that are not about the Civil War (or at least explicitly about the Civil War.) See what else was going on in the world in the 1860s!

In order for you to begin adding information to our TimeMapper, you will input data and metadata into a special Google Form that I have set up for this purpose: HUMN 100 TimeMapper Google Form.

Added by editor: please add your event and name to the table on this Google doc: https://docs.google.com/a/bucknell.edu/document/d/1t7Ff085N3rV02NLHEXRdxjjmLK51uqqMRgUJKRbtAPI/edit?usp=sharing 

Email me with any questions that arise. We’ll work on the TimeMapper again on Monday.

Categories
Blog #2 Digging

Utilizing Voyant for Distant Reading tools

Voyant is a great resource to find trends in specific documents. In particular, I will be using “Collocate Clusters” to make connections between words and ideas in a series of comprised diary entries by James Merrill Linn. In Linn’s diary, he writes, “War is horrible. I first saw the pomp & circumstance – the battle field – the dead and wounded now the prison ship.” The hypothesis poses the question, “For Linn, is this a turning point where he loses his innocence?” Using Voyant to see relationships between words, I will analyze to see if I can draw any conclusions from this hypothesis.

Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 3.09.49 PM
Relationship between “boat” and “men” in Linn’s diary entries

At first, I tried using word cloud to look at trends in the diary. The two words that stood out to me were “boat” and “men”. Boat did not appear to be as prominent as other words, as boat was only used 81 times in the diary entries. However, after transcribing a diary page about Linn’s experience boating, there were many words that related to boat in the diary, including men, captain, and regiment. Instead of using word cloud, I decided to look at the relationship between boat and other common words. Therefore, I added the comprised Linn diary entries and edited my settings by putting in stop words. Then, I typed in boat to see the first few connections. As a result, men not only was one of the most common words used in the entire document, but it was also related to boat in the diary.

Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 3.47.56 PM
Relationship between “boat”, “men”, and “wounded” in Linn’s diary entries

Next, I wanted to look at connections with one of the words used in the given quote by Linn. I chose “wounded”, mostly because I remember transcribing it in my specific diary entry.  I typed “wounded” in the search bar at the top to hopefully find connections with boat and men. I found that wounded was not as commonly used in the diary as men because wounded was only used 31 times whereas men was used 133 times. Although wounded was not used as often, there was a connection to men. Therefore, wounded was indirectly connected to boat because men and boat had a greater connection.

This is useful information for distant reading because the connecting words and the sizes of the words show how often Linn used them and the major and minor connections between those words. Unfortunately, this resource does not help me come to a conclusion about Linn’s loss of innocence because it does not reveal any trends. For example, the hypothesis was asking if Linn lost his innocence halfway through the transcription but I am unable to draw any conclusions because there’s no time frame for the connections. This means that I cannot easily find within the document where and when these words were used. Word cloud may be more useful in terms of finding trends, but Links is better for making connections and seeing how words relate within a document. Using both of these tools together could be extremely beneficial by making common connections between words or ideas, and also by showing you where the words are specifically in the document and how often they are used. Because I could not draw any conclusions relative to the hypothesis, I am posing a question about distant reading in general. When doing distant reading, is it better to begin by making connections with words or by finding specific trends or patterns of the words? I believe that these distant reading tools go hand and hand; however, depending on what you are searching for, one can be more helpful than the other. In our case, when analyzing Linn’s diary, both Word Cloud and Links could be used together to find the best result.