The Reliability of the Linn Diary

All of the work that we have done in this course has focused on the Diary of James Merrill Linn.  During our time together this semester, aside from just learning the skills and tools of digital humanities research, we also developed a working knowledge of the Burnside Expedition, and the Civil War as a whole.  As a final project, I wanted to determine if our new historical knowledge was based on reliable evidence.


 Was James Merrill Linn a reliable, factual storyteller in the entries in his diary?


 

To answer this question, I decided to find another reputable source of information about events of the Burnside Expedition and compare the versions of events written in that source with the versions told by Linn.  In making these comparisons, I also hoped to learn more about what can be gained from looking at historical events from multiple perspectives.  I chose to compare Linn’s diary against the Burnside biography linked on our WordPress site because I believed that it could provide an objective, ‘zoomed out’ perspective on the events I wanted to examine.  I also chose to limit the scope of this project to the events leading up to and during the battle of South Mills.

Side by SideThe first step in the process was to go through the two texts and pull out lines where both authors were writing about the same event.  I viewed the two texts side-by-side, and copied over quotes of the similar areas into an organizational text document to begin a list of the events that I wanted to study more closely.

The Quote LogThough the main essence of this project is text based, I still wanted to present the results as a story; the story of the Battle of South Mills as told from two separate perspectives.  Out of all the visualization tools we worked with throughout the semester, I liked ArcGIS the most for storytelling, so I chose to use that to display my findings.  However, instead of trying to show the similarities and differences on the map, I would use it to draw the viewer’s attention to certain locations of interest, and explain the findings of the project using popups and later the map journal sidebar.

Once I knew I wanted to mark each event on the map, the next question to Linn Mapanswer was ‘how?’  I determined that by using icons available in the map notes feature of ArcGIS, I could create nodes on the map that had a visual relation to the event that it represented.  I feel that this choice of visual representation helped to keep visual clutter down to a minimum, as the icon was all that was needed to represent each point of interest in the project.

As for the maps I selected, the map of the Battle of South Mills was an obvious choice.  It allowed me to place mid-battle nodes in proper places relative to each other and to the bigger overall scale of the battle.  The pre-battle events were not nearly as location-specific, and so a less detailed map of a larger area was needed.  In this case, the other map I chose for those elements was the North Carolina east coast map.

While I was analyzing the differences between the two writings at each event, I was coming up with different conclusions at each one.  I realized that this was something I also wanted to convey to any viewers of the project, so I decided to include these conclusions along with the explanation of the interesting comparisons in the sidebar slides of the map journal publication.

The Reliability of the Linn DiaryAt each slide of the published map journal, I decided to have the pop-up caption for the current node automatically open.  These pop-ups all contain quotations from the original text which are very helpful for understanding the points being made in each slide of the sidebar.  These automatic pop-ups are also useful during the Battle of South Mills to delineate which node out of the small cluster iscurrently active and being discussed.

After finishing this project, I’m fairly confident that I managed to answer my initial question.  After cross-examination of both works of writing, I’m willing to say that Linn’s diary is accurate enough for us to gather reliable information about the Civil War and the Burnside Expedition from it.  There were differences between the two versions of the story, but most of those are able to be explained simply by the difference in point of view.  There were even a number of occasions where the Linn Diary went into more detail about an event than Burnside’s biography did, leading me to believe that Linn intended for his writings to be a reference for his actions in the Civil War.

In addition, I learned how important it is to check multiple references and points of view when analyzing a particular historical event.  By combining the information recorded in the two writings that I studied, I was able to form a more complete picture of the battle of South Mills than either one could have given me individually.  Every source seems to be likely to include some bit of data that all other references missed, and each bit can be added to the story like a puzzle piece, bringing you closer to fully understanding the event.

Overall, I thought that mapping using ArcGIS was the most effective of the methods we used in class for this project.  Although it didn’t help me to formulate or organize my thoughts about my research question, it did provide me with a way to easily share my results with others.The Reliability of the Linn Diary (1)

Works Cited

Linn, James Merrill. Diary. April 17-19 1862. MS. Bucknell University Archives and Special Collections, Lewisburg, PA.

Ibrahim, Mohamed.  Rowboat Map Icon.  clker.com  Retrieved 3 Dec. 2014

Woodbury, Augustus.  “Major General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth…”  S.S. Rider & Brother, 1867.  As retrieved from course WordPress Site.

Annapolis to Roanoke: The Troubled Naval Voyage of the Burnside Armada

The Movement of General Burnside’s Armada

http://bit.ly/1vWDVP6

When I started this project, I knew I wanted to talk about Linn’s naval travel, but I was unsure about what specific aspect would be most interesting. My research question was how did naval warfare effect the way that the Civil War was fought, and how did the weather, tides, wind, and other nautical issues effect the way that the war played out. The answer, however, was hidden deeper than I expected. In order to start teasing out the answers to those questions, I began to read through both the Linn diary from January 6th to February 1st and the 3rd and 4th chapters of the Burnside Diary, highlighting things that were related to naval movement, a struggle that they faced while on the water, and anything that I thought could be added to my map to further my story. Both accounts go into incredible detail about the terrible struggles they faced while on these ships, and my fear changed from not knowing what to talk about to not knowing how to pick out the best information and represent it on my map. My next issue was going to be finding what could be depicted as text and what could be added as visuals. After highlighting some sections of all of the texts, I went back through and changed the color of highlighted sections to green that I thought could be represented with symbols on my map.

A sample of my highlighting of the journal

A sample of my highlighting of the journal

As I continued to do this, I complied a sort of relative timeline, which was, at its core, chronological, but at the same time was not necessarily linear. I found that although information may not be grouped together in the journals, adding it together on my map would allow better understanding of how issues related to nautical travel harassed them during their passage. After moving all of the information from the highlighted journals to the progression of the story that I wanted to tell, I found that I had both information that was clumped linearly and information that went together best when pulled from different areas and presented together.

An example of non-linear information that helps my story when clumped together

An example of non-linear information that helps my story when clumped together. In this case, issues caused by large waves

An example of a section of my linear timeline, where it made sense to present the data chronologically

An example of a section of my linear timeline, where it made sense to present the data chronologically

Unable to find a true ending in the information that I had, I decided to continue on in the Burnside Biography, reading the 4th chapter, when I had initially intended to just use the 3rd, and decided that the perfect ending for my story was when they disembark from the Cossack and arrived at Roanoke. Then, I went onto my map and went through my new “storyboard,” adding map notes in places where I thought they would better represent an ideal better than just pure text. I broke these up into several different layers so that I could isolate the notes that represent different types of events, obstacles, and movements.

The different layers of my map notes

The different layers of my map notes

Then, I started to move the rest of my story into the panels, while trying to connect the images on my map to the writing on the panels. As I continued to work, my idea of how I was going to represent my story changed again, and I put different pieces of information where I thought they fit best, not necessarily where they landed in the story. After looking over what I had added and what I had left out so far, something that I found that I had not added were a lot of the direct quotes from the journal. Although I had used these quotes as evidence for some of the text in my side bar, I thought that adding the first hand perspective of these soldiers would strengthen my argument. In order to do this in a matter than continued my exploration of combining visual and textual aspects, I decided that the best place to include these quotes was in the bubbles of the map notes. By adding the quotes to these notes, I hoped to allow the reader to draw a deeper understanding of both what these visuals truly represented and how they connect to the writing in the side bar.

An example of the link between my quotes and writing

An example of the link between my quotes and writing.

The quotes also proved helpful in other ways, as the combination of quotes, historical maps, and the distance indicators on the charts allowed me to estimate several locations, such as the wreckage of the Pocahontas. In the journal, Linn describes the wreckage to be 15 miles above the lighthouse, so using the distance measures on the chart I literally used a note card to measure out 15 miles and guess where the wreckage could be.

An example of how quotes helped me create links to visuals

An example of how quotes helped me create links to visuals

Because I had to estimate a lot of the locations, using bubbles and free form areas seemed like the best option because it allowed some error in my approximations. The intersection of visuals and text turned out to be one of the hardest aspects, as representing a complex story through multiple different outlets is never easy. As things began to come together, I looked back over what I had done to see if I thought it presented my story well. Although I do believe that there are some limitations to the ArcGIS software, I think that there was no other medium that could present my story in a better way. By integrating visuals and text, I was able to show the audience the movement of the ships, key points of interest, projected locations of different anchorages, wrecks, and lighthouses, as well as explaining the story of the armada and the struggles they faced. A perfect example of this integration is my work on the “swash,” which was represented with a combination of quotes, map notes, text in the side bar, and an additional historical chart.

Screen Shot 2014-12-16 at 2.45.46 PM

An example of how the integration of text and visuals allows for a deeper understanding

Although all of this process may seem important, the building blocks of what of my successful story erupted from the storyboarding process. By laying out what I wanted to say, it allowed me to see all aspects of my thoughts, and manipulate them in the easiest way for my audience to understand. The image that my work had created said less about how naval warfare affected the Civil War as whole, but endless information on how the natural struggles of naval travel inhibited the travel and success of Burnside’s armada, and additionally, how the weather and its associates, such as wind, current, tide, waves, and fog, affected their movement and the advance of the armada as a whole. The data projected a story about nature, whether it be the land itself or the weather, and its effect on travel, and less about the war and the actual battles. The ships constantly had to stop sailing because of thick fog, lost contact with each other due to heavy winds and large waves, and in some cases, the ships were wrecked due to any number of reasons including being stuck on sand bars because of wild tides, thrown into each other by waves, and having water overflow over the sides while in the valley between waves. The Civil War was a dangerous era in naval travel, mostly because of the lack the technology we have today, and the Burnside Armada would have faced issues even in the most spectacular of weather. However, because they faced one of the worst storms in years, the struggles associated with naval travel were increased exponentially. This project allowed me to foster a deeper understanding of both naval travels during this time and how drastically weather conditions can alter the success of a voyage.

Bibliography 

Foster, John G. Sketch Showing Route of the Burnside Expedition [to Roanoke Island, N.C., February 6, 1862]. Digital Image. Digital image.Library of Congress. Washington, Government Printing Office, 1866. Web. 12 Dec. 2014. <http://www.loc.gov/resource/g3901s.cw0317120/>.

Hatteras Inlet Map. Digital image. Sons of the South. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2014. <http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1862/february/hatteras-inlet-map.htm>. I found this map inside of a Harper’s Weekly Civil War newspaper from February 15th, 1862.

Linn, James Merrill. Diary. January 6th– February 1st 1862. MS. Bucknell University Archives and Special Collections, Lewisburg, PA.

Major-General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps: A Narrative of Campaigns in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, During the War for the Preservation of the Republic. Chapters 3-4. Augustus Woodbury, 1866

“Map of the North Carolina Coast.” Extract from Harper’s History of the Great Rebellion, Feb. 1862, p. 243. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/ncmaps/id/887/rec/26

United States Coast Survey. Preliminary Chart of Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina. Digital image. Library of Congress. N.p., 1862. Web. 12 Dec. 2014 <http://www.loc.gov/resource/g3902h.cw0316700/>.