Before the Poe and the Declaration of Independence assignments, I had some experience with TEI encoding, but was not too sure about its applications to real texts. I quickly learned that it was a great way to organize text by using tags. When I began the Poe reading, I was struggling to understand the story. I had a hard time distinguishing characters and places from each other. I was forced to go back and read the whole story. As I did this, I noticed that I was reading in a different way. I was creating a mental map of the characters and places involved. I took note of things that I normally would not have taken note of such as states, traits, occupations, and other descriptive words. I think that TEI allowed me to see what Poe intended the reader to see. Characterization and details were very vivid and I felt a much deeper connection to the text than I would have if I had not done TEI on the text. I mainly used desc tags along with state, trait, occupation, and persName. I think that these were most helpful in allowing me to organize the text for my self.
The Declaration of Independence assignment was a fun assignment for me. I was assigned Josiah Bartlett as my subject. I felt as though I learned a lot about him and I was impressed because I had not heard of him before this assignment. Using TEI to simplify his life, family, and political events was a cool way to organize all that he was as a person. I am sure that there is way more to him than the records show, but it made me think about how my own encoding would look and I compared myself to him a little bit. Although this TEI was doing a different task from the TEI in the Poe assignment, it still created a more organized picture for me. The only thing that I did not like about this assignment is that my work was all deleted after I had made a lot of progress on it in class and I had to redo it all and forgot some key aspects that I had included in my original version.
