With the two assignments given for the TEI exercises I found the Declaration of independence to be my preferred one however both were very interesting. In the Poe exercise I was assigned the first segment of the Rue Morgue text. I first went through and changed all the text formatting that needed to be done, then I went through and marked up the different words. This exercise was nice because it was a nice introduction to the TEI coding format, but the following exercise was much more interesting. The Declaration assignment was very interesting I thought, I started my process with doing some research on John Adams and then slowly coding anything that I found interesting into the program. In John Adams case I thought there were a lot of different events that I found interesting, but I was unsure if multiple events were necessary for the assignment that we were given. Regardless I still found the assignment very interesting.
After working with the TEI encoding program I think I have found a new respect for not only for the semantic mark-up we have been doing, but also for the class as a whole. I found this type of assignment became very engaging and even fun. I especially enjoyed the declaration assignment , because not only in doing my own project but also when I looked over other individuals projects I became very interested in looking into their persons as well. Also when playing with the TEI encoding I found it extremely interesting to see all the different ways you could mark up the same information. After working on the declaration assignment I found myself reflecting on the opening line of the Rasmussen reading where it begins with the quote, “We read texts in their native print medium, that is, in books; but we study texts and works in editions—in editions that live in the digital medium.” For some reason after doing this assignment this quote made me really think about the last time I actually studied something that wasn’t in a digital medium, and for the life of me I couldn’t come up with anything. This in turn led me to reflect on a quote from the Pierazzo reading. As Pierazzo stated in her abstract, “Publishing the diplomatic edition of a document on the web instead of in print implies a series of methodological and practical changes in the nature of the published text and in the operations to be performed by the editors.” As we have seen through the encoding done in TEI Pierazzo is correct in this statement, and after working with TEI I hope there will be more opportunities in the future to do more.
I love the Declaration of Independence exercise too! It’s fascinating to do some research on someone that you don’t really know but was important at his period of time. As you mentioned that it’s interesting that one could mark up the same information in different ways, I actually think it’s a really confusing thing. This means that different editors will mark up in different ways, which will make the later synthesis and analysis part of the work much harder.
I agree with you as well- I enjoyed the Declaration of Independence work more than the Poe work. As you said, it permitted more exploration and curiosity than did the Poe work. Even though I already knew a lot about my person, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, I got to learn more about him through research. I also can relate to the struggle to keep up and manage with the various tags that can be used in TEI. Even though I have worked with TEI before, I still had trouble organizing my tags and figuring out which ones I should use.
On another note, your comment about the ubiquity of digital mediums in scholarly / academic work resonated with me. I too reflected on my use of print mediums and found that digital mediums dominate my academic landscape. Almost all my readings are online or can be found online. I also like the use of the Pierazzo quote as I agree and think that digital media is revolutionizing the way we think about published material and how people navigate it.
I really like how you mentioned the multiple ways people could mark up the same piece of text. I feel like there are a lot of different ways a person can go about grouping and marking up the information presented. Your Pierazzo quote really resonates with this because he’s talking about the subjectivity that comes with editing a text and how it evolves into a new edition in this regard.