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[abbeyk111]

A question that really stands out to me about the first strike-out on this page is why she decided to remove it at all. In many cases throughout the novel, when she removes a word or phrase, she does it because she wants to rewrite it differently. However, with "and in many cases the slave possesses more," Crafts never rewords it, she just removes it completely from the passage. This is especially interesting because this cut-line is part of a quote that Mr. Trappe says to her. That makes me further question why she removed it. Did she think about adding it to his words to make him sound more sinister than she was already portraying him and then decided against it? Or was it something that he had actually said to her that she decided she didn't want to be documented? These questions also further come from the debates over whether Crafts wrote this completely documenting her real-life experiences or if it is heavily fictionalized to create a "better" story in her eyes. When looking a bit further down in the passage, the line "He said this composedly as if she were a mere machine." This line makes me think back to the line that she had removed because I feel that the original line adds more to Trappe's dehumanization of the slaves he is trading. He has never been enslaved, yet in this passage he is trying to justify his slave-trading "career" by attempting to create the point that slaves are more "free" than anybody else because they have experienced what it is like to be enslaved.

[abbeyk111]

Natural Readers #3

My tool has limitations both in the fact that there are some aspects of it hidden behind a paywall, and also because it only has features regarding "speech." The tool really only works to recite words/passages back to the user, and even then, if you provide it with an image that has hard-to-read words, it struggles. It also doesn't always pronounce words correctly, making it unhelpful to people who are trying to use the tool to better understand words they aren't sure of.

Natural Readers has no analysis ability that could help the user better understand the text they are entering. Therefore, you would need a different program, such as Chat GPT, to help you break down and analyze the text. At least with that aspect, Natural Readers seemingly doesn't have any bias because the only job that it's programmed to do is to read things out loud. In my opinion, you are better off using something such as Google Translate to help you with pronunciation because it both breaks down the words for you and provides definitions.

[abbeyk111]

Natural Readers #2

To play around with Natural Reader, I started out by inserting the file I saved of "The Sick Rose" by William Blake. I selected this piece first because I was curious to see how well the AI would work considering Blake's poetry is not just words, but also images. The actual words of the poem are also hard to read in places, so I was hoping the bot would be able to decipher the letters I was having trouble with. From the very beginning of the poem, the bot struggled, saying "Q Rose" instead of "O Rose."

I then decided to see how it worked with "London," as that poem I felt was more difficult to decipher. In the beginning, the bot was actually doing a relatively good job, and it wasn't having many issues with getting the correct words. Until the third and fourth stanzas, when it got more words incorrect than it did correct.

The bot also does not have a good flow while reading, sometimes reading much faster than the line breaks of the poem seem to want. I even changed to a different voice, hoping a more "natural" sounding voice would do a better job, but the result was the same.

This tool didn't really do anything to help me better understand the poems I entered. If anything, it would have thrown me off if I didn't previously know how to pronounce some of the words it mispronounced and didn't know how quickly the poem was intended to be read.

[abbeyk111]

Natural Readers

Natural Readers is a website that uses AI to turn text into spoken speech. It is available as a website, Chrome extension, and Mobile App. It also has both free and paid versions, but the free version allows the user unlimited use of the "free voices" on the site. On the website, the user picks one of the voices—which they are able to listen to each one before they make their selection—and then just copies and pastes a chunk of text into the box. The selected voice then reads the entire text out to the user. If the user has the Chrome extension, the bot can read directly from a Google Doc, online books, and email. If the user has the mobile app downloaded on their phone, they can take a picture of the page they want read aloud, whether from a book or notebook, and the bot will do it.

I can see how this software can be useful in many ways. Firstly, if there is a word or name in a piece of text that a person is unsure how to pronounce, in theory, they should be able to enter it into the box and have the bot say it back to them. It can also work to make things more accessible to those who have vision impairments, as they can take photos of text and have it recited to them rather than struggling to read them. I can also see how it can be helpful to people who prefer listening to Audiobooks since they can enter Online books and texts directly into the site and have them read aloud. It can also be useful in terms of literary criticism and analysis because tone is very important when it comes to what the author is trying to express, and in being able to enter the text and hear it back to you, you may be able to better hear the tone of the author/story.

[abbeyk111]

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[abbeyk111]

With the words becoming all jumbled up, it really feels like it adds ti the stress of how much work Mammy Judy has to get done before she is allowed to enjoy her holiday. When reading the new sentences that have formed, it almost feels like Mammy Judy is so stressed from her work that her to-do list is getting so mixed up she is losing track of it. The to-do list also feels longer, since the sentences are so confusing that it feels like she needs to get a million extra things done. This passage, especially after it is all mixed up, reminds me of Cinderella and how she is told that she will be able to go to the ball if she gets all of her work done, but then her stepmother and stepsisters just pile extra work onto her ensuring that she won't be able to finish it and enjoy her night off.

[abbeyk111]

[abbeyk111]

I really find it fascinating how connected to the sea they are. Melville describes the Nantucketer as “owning the sea”, which is interesting because all of the world’s oceans are so large that is really impossible for any one nation, much less one person, to have complete ownership over it. The Nantucketer lives on the sea and it is described that his whole livelihood is connected to the sea, and I feel like this really offers him a great deal of freedom. When it comes to the ocean, people can attempt to patrol it but in reality, it is just too large an area for any laws of the land to truly stand, so by living off of the sea the Nantucketer can live a life pretty free from the laws and standards of society. 

The Nantucketers are also described as “sea hermits”, which goes in line with the idea that they have vast freedom out on the ocean. Although the ocean is seen as a dangerous and unknown place, and many people die while out on the ocean, for the Nantucketer it provides almost a net of safety. The ocean provides pretty much everything he needs in order to thrive and the harsh waves can provide him safety from other people. I find the last sentence of the paragraph very beautiful, as it talks about how he is rocked to sleep by the waves while herds of walruses and whales swim beneath him. I love how this line shows the beauty of life and how as humans nod off to sleep, other creatures are still active and thriving as they remain untouched by humankind. 

My question for the class would be: Which line of this passage stood out to you the most and why?

My question for Ishmael would be: What do you find most fascinating about the Nantucketers and how they live?

My question for Herman Melville would be: What/who do you base the Nantucketer that you write about in this passage on?

[abbeyk111]

My question for the class would be: Which line of this passage stood out to you the most and why?

My question for Ishmael would be: What do you find most fascinating about the Nantucketers and how they live?

My question for Herman Melville would be: What/who do you base the Nantucketer that you write about in this passage on?

[abbeyk111]

 Chapter 6, page 63

I chose the passage where Phoebe is describing the Pyncheon’s garden because while reading the passage I believe that the state of the garden and the way she describes it also describes the house and the Pyncheon family in some ways.

“Vagrant” “decay” “death” “evil” “symbolic” “society” “Defective” “careful labor” “hereditary”

When I chose these words, I was trying to convey how the Pyncheon family is presented in their garden. At first glance, they seem uncared for and deformed, and even linked with misfortune and death (as seen with the dead plants), but they do have people who are looking out for them, and they always look out and care for each other. (Phoebe)

When I chose these words, I was trying to convey how the Pyncheon family looks from an outsider's perspective. The curse placed on them by Matthew Maule seems to hang around the whole family like a dark cloud, yet when you get closer and look deeper, there is beauty in how the family members who live in the house rely on each other. (Holgrave) 

The text uses these words or images to highlight the way the Pyncheon family is. Separately, they are all very different people, which is especially clear in the feud between Hepzibah and Judge. The family is associated with death and darkness, but there are parts of them that are quite bright, such as Phoebe’s overall demeanor and how Hepzibah and Phoebe cared for Clifford since the end of his imprisonment.

[abbeyk111]

Colonial Reflection

From all of the readings for class these past few weeks, the biggest thing that tends to pop up in most stories from that time was the importance of the church in early settlements. As seen in Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World, there are multiple mentions of activities that are “of the devil”. There is also a mention of how one of the women accused of witchcraft was partly accused because she didn’t attend the town church meetings. The importance of religion is also presented in Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity, Suffering, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. In Rowlandson’s recount, she brings up the Lord and how she was constantly trying to keep her faith during hard times. She also talks about how her saving grace was receiving a bible and being able to read it. Another thing that is present in the readings is how much of a belief there was in the supernatural. In Mather’s writings, many of the trials include mentions of visions of ghostly apparitions and other supernatural occurrences. The importance of farming is also prominent in literature from that time, especially in Mather’s work, which mentions how livestock and crops were affected.