Linn’s diary – Digging into the Digital

Chronology:TimeMapper

TimeMapper is a great tool for organizing and representing events. Through TimeMapper, we can organize informations into a timeline of significant events. We often think of time as a linear line, however, time is nonlinear (Grafton, 20). Historical events usually don’t start and end in a linear fashion. There are many events happening at the same time with different causes and ends. Using timelines, we can illustrate time as an order of events.

Above is our TimeMapper of the 1860s. The key idea of chronographic is not to design “more complex visual schemes” but rather to “simplify” it (19). By treating time as a linear line, we can see the connections between different events in an era. For example, we often relate the 1860s to the civil war but there were a lot more happening in the 1860s than the Civil War. The Civil War took about 4 years from 1861 to 1865. There were also the American-Indian Wars and the inventions of telegraph and dynamite which we are oblivious to. Using TimeMapper, we can understand a lot more about the 1860s. Like Linn, we are confined to a certain amount of informations which we can only experience personally. In the diary, Linn was oblivious to the world around him. He was only concern with what he was personally experiencing. With the help of timelines, we can study history more chronologically correct.

Screen Shot 2014-10-05 at 11.27.32 PM This is an example of many events that are significant but not directly correlated with the Civil War. Since time is nonlinear (20), the connection between events in a timeline is not easy to grasp. Grafton stated in his article that “the line can be everywhere because it is so flexible and its configurations so diverse” (13). We don’t usually associate the Indian War with the 1860s since the Civil War was considered more significant. Seeing the orders of events of the Civil War and this massacre, we can make the connection between the Civil War and the Indian Wars.

Distant Reading

In this post, I will discuss Linn’s loss of innocence with the use of Voyant Tools. While messing around with Voyant Tools, I was able to see the correlations between a lot of different words. The first word I looked at was “shot”. As a soldier in the civil war, I expected Linn to have seen a lot of gruesome battles. “Shot” was the first word that came to my mind when thinking of the Civil war. However, when searching for “shot”, there was 11 times that this word come up in the diary. The only places that the word “shot” was significant was when Linn talked about people getting wounded. Though the word was not often, it did show Linn’s loss of innocence as he witness more injuries and death. Lenig’s and Buskirk’s injuries seemed to take a toll on Linn as he mentioned this twice in his diary, on April 15th and April 19th. Since the word was not used as often as I expected, I moved on to “sick” and “hospital”.

Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 10.09.51 PM

Remembering Linn mentioned a lot of people getting sick throughout the whole diary, I decided that “sick” and “hospital” would give a better idea of Linn’s innocence. Using Voyant Tools, I was able to see the connections between “sick” and “hospital”. “Hospital” was used 16 times and “sick” was used 38 times. Looking at the graph, we can see that the frequencies of these words are very similar. This directly correlate with the horrible conditions of the war. As the war progress, the use of “hospital” increased. This proved that injuries and illness took a big part in this war and on Linn’s innocence.

The connections of these word Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 11.07.12 PM s brings me to a new question: What words are connected with these? Using Links, I tried to see how they intertwine. However, seeing that they never directly intertwine, I decided to use different variations of “sick”. I used “sickness”, “disease”, and “illness”. Finally, with “disease”, I was able to find a direct connection with “hospital”.

Seeing these connections, I learned that distant reading can be very useful in understanding a large document in a short time. Using these tools, we can process a large amount of informations that would take a lot of work and time otherwise.