Throughout the semester, we have learned how to digitally document and explore Moravian artifacts and more specifically, the Powell Diary, through different digital humanities projects.
These Digital Humanities projects make certain information easy to share with users and promote new research findings. Throughout the course of the semester, we have learned how to create and analyze seven different types of digital humanities projects including; Archive, Visualization, Mapping, Digital edition, Network Analysis, Textual analysis and Audio analysis. For my final project I chose to transcribe Martha Powell’s Memoir, and then publish the finished transcription in Oxygen. Martha Powell was the wife of Joseph Powell, however her husband never mentioned her in the Powell Diary. I found this very interesting, and wanted to further explore the Moravian lifestyles as well as attempt to draw connections between both the Powell Diary and Martha Powell’s Memoir.
By transcribing an archival document such as Martha Powell’s memoir, I as the researcher and editor was able to view the exact handwriting of Martha Powell, which is very beneficial when transcribing. Archival documents display a great deal of information that allow researchers to travel back into history, and in this case, Moravian history, and help us to draw connections between their ways of life as well as draw personal connections. In my first blog post, I discussed both archival documents as well as digital artifacts and the impact they have on the digital humanities. From transcribing and marking up both Martha Powell’s memoir and the Powell Diary, I was able to fully understand the benefits of digital archives. Although at times, they are difficult to read or understand, they open up a new world in the means of studying history.
Before transcribing the artifact, I developed a set of research questions to clarify the goals of my transcription. What if any are the connections one can draw between the Powell Diary and Martha Powell’s Memoir? Does transcribing Martha’s Memoir lead to a further understanding of the Powell Diary, or simply show another side to the story? How will publishing Martha’s Memoir further expand the understanding of the Moravian Mission life, and more specifically the lives of lower class working women in that time? To answer these questions, I first transcribed the twelve handwritten pages of Martha Powell’s memoir on a Word document. Because I had previously transcribed two pages from the Powell Diary, the process felt more comfortable, as I was familiar with the special characters and abbreviations.
The memoir however also contained words and certain formatting that I was not familiar with, as my section of the Powell Diary did not contain such markings. For example, strike-outs or superscript markings were quite prevalent in the Memoir, and in turn, I had to seek help from Professor Jakacki when marking up the Memoir in Oxygen.
After transcribing the memoir, I pasted the finished document into an Oxygen file to being my tagging process. I decided which words I wanted to tag and how, based on how I marked up my portion of the Powell Diary. The tagging process took a good amount of time, as it was significantly longer than the Powell Diary, however Martha Powell’s writing was very different than her husband Josephs. In her Memoir, she documented the important events that occurred throughout her life, and demonstrated a great deal of emotion throughout her writing. Unlike the Powell Diary, the memoir most generally addressed Martha’s progression through life and the journeys she set off on with her husband.
Martha Powell was a dancer, which was very uncommon at that time, as not many Moravian women had occupations. From reading her memoir, it was also clear that she had a very close relationship with her husband, which was ironic as she was never mentioned in the Powell Diary. Martha also spoke of many journeys, which made it easy to draw connections between locations mentioned in the Powell Diary and the memoir. The Powell’s traveled to many places throughout New England including Long Island, Danbury, Philadelphia, Bethlehem and Shamokin. Because the archive was a Memoir, there was much more emotion and personal information in the writing. This differed from the Powell Diary, as Joseph simply documented daily events without a great deal of emotion.
Martha‘s Memoir conveyed a different type of feeling as I transcribed her writing, which was helpful when comparing both the Powell Diary and the memoir. Through the depth of her storytelling including her detailed travels and relations with family members and her husband, the memoir was certainly able to further our understanding of Moravian life throughout the eighteenth century.
Links to the Memoir: