If Text Then Code

Declaration still shaping the World

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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.

Who locked the door?

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For our project we started with a basic maze idea that we’ve developed into a better story. The player is inside a building with ten rooms. Each room has different things in it, and the player needs to use the items to help them escape the building. Originally the project was going to take on more of a stranded in the woods story line, where the story line would have been something like this:

“You’ve just woken up and feel groggy; the last thing you remember is getting a couple drinks with friends. You look around and realize you are surrounded by trees and shrubs. However you can see what looks like a path that you may have formed on your way here. You analyze the path and realize that you can either go left or right

Right: you walk around the corner and hear a rustling in the bushes after further investigation you realize there is a poisonous snake in the bushes and before you have the chance to jump back it strikes. You have no chance of recovering from this so you die! Start Over?

You can’t start over dummy you’re dead.

Left:  you walk down the path, but it is still dark out, you have the feeling that something could be watching you. As you continue down the path you hear wolves howling in the background and they sound like they are getting closer. You are getting very nervous and start to run, when you come to a fork in the path one to the left and one to the right which do you choose?”

However after discussing the idea we decided that this idea was probably too simple and wouldn’t really challenge the player since you would just be guessing left or right the entire time. So the team decided that it might be better to challenge the player intellectually. This gave us the idea of the ten rooms seen below. Each room has items inside it and some are necessary to get put and some are not.

Working on this assignment as a team has been very beneficial because it allows us to pool different ideas and mesh them together. I find it very interesting to see how people with different backgrounds and majors can contribute to an idea and continue to keep making it better. Personally this exercise is very helpful to me because the computer science majors that I have for partners are able to do an excellent job at explaining any questions I have regarding the coding portion of the assignment.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License Bucknell University Humanities 271 Course by Diane Jakacki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.