If Text Then Code

Letter Transcription

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This is the first time for me to actually read and even to transcribe a manuscript. As a non-native English speaker, it is particular difficult for me to understand the writings. For instance, when I don’t know a word, there is no way for me to figure out the handwriting version of that word. This happened very frequently when my group was doing the first transcription together. In addition, there are many person names and place names, which made the process even harder and more frustrating. During the group transcription, I relied a lot on the other group members, and was obviously slower than how they were moving forward. When I tried to do my own transcription, I had to look back to the transcribed letter that my group did in class and compare to the manuscript to see how he wrote each letter. It was such a pain and thus I decided to use a letter transcribed by Professor Jakacki. The mark-up process was so much better. It helped me a lot to better understand the letter and his writing style, and thus was very helpful for me to understand his experience during the war.

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Being in the Archives changed my first impression on these manuscripts. When I first saw those digital manuscripts, the first word that came to my mind was messy, and I didn’t find their handwritings beautiful at all. However, when I actually got to hold the real letter, I was really surprised by the quality of Merrill’s handwriting. The texture of the paper was decent, and the cursive handwriting was extremely beautiful. I would be way less frustrated with the transcription  assignment if I was using the real letter. For me, the real letter is a lot cleaner and easier to read. However, it is not possible to give everyone access to all manuscripts. Therefore, digital copies are necessary to spread the information. If I did not have access to the paper copy, I will try to look for different versions of the digital copy online, since light and scanning technology can really affect the quality of a digital copy.

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In Merrill’s letter, he mentioned that he had a cold which was affecting him a lot. While I was reading Merrill’s journal, I found that he caught the cold on the 25th, which is two days before he wrote the letter. The cold lasted for 4 days. In addition, I also noticed that when he was writing to himself, he included a lot more details than he wrote to others. For example, he mentioned the moss that he picked up when he first landed at Slocum creek in both the letter and his journal of the day. However, in the journal he included a lot more description about the moss, as well as the underlying meaning of this moss — his first encounter with the place.

TEI – Text Analysis and Data Management

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This module is about text markup and data storing using TEI. The “language” TEI is new to me, and I had a surprising moment when I first got to understand the real difference between TEI and HTML, and also other traditional programming languages like Python. In my mind, TEI is more like a format of storing information (text and data). It is more like JSON than like Python or Javascript.

As I became familiar with TEI through the exercises (Poe and Declaration of Independence), I discovered that TEI does make the texts to be clearer to me and help me understand the subject a lot better. As a Computer Science major, I did not like reading, especially close reading. Most of the time I found close reading a big headache. However, text is a very important source for analyzing other people’s work, “we have access to a work only through its texts, which serve as the basis for our readings and interpretations (Rasmussen 122)”. The TEI markup process made the reading process a totally different experience for me. For the Poe markup assignment, as I was paying close attention to the different semantic categories of the phrases used in a text, I also got a deep understanding of the tone of the segment, which I don’t think I can gain as naturally without the usage of TEI. In my markup, I used state tags to distinguish different mood of the character as he was being tortured, and assigned different types of states (sensation, action, and also despair because of the amount of despair mood that the author used for the character). Then, I used traits tags for the adjectives that I found particularly important in understanding the threatening and bloody tone of the text. In addition, I also made markups for objects, places, person names, etc. By using TEI, I have achieved all three levels of reading as described by Rasmussen — “the level of manipulation, focused on the handling of texts and on their actual acquisition; next the level of comprehension, directed at reading as an understanding of the linguistic text itself; and finally the level of interpretation, in which connections are drawn between the text and other texts that explain it (Rasmussen 128).”

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(My Poe markup assignment)

The Declaration of Independence exercise was very different, but showed a different perspective of the usage of TEI — data storing, management, and sharing. By researching adding information about a signer of Declaration of Independence, I have completed the process of collecting, storing, managing, and sharing data. My data were collected from the Wikipedia page of the person, stored in the XML file, managed by the tags around each piece of data, and shared to the rest of the class by merging on GitHub. TEI is not only a clean way to store and manage data, but also makes the sharing and collaborating process much easier.

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(My Declaration of Independence exercise)

EscapeTheMaze.py – Reflection #1

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Our project a basically a maze combined with room-escaping game, with narrative associated to it to make the background richer and more attractive to the players. We haven’t really decided completely on what the narrative would be, but we have roughed out a character who suddenly find him/herself in the middle of a set of strange rooms and is trying to get out of the place through a door located at one end of the rooms. The conflicts we were building for the character include a variety of challenges and traps that need to be solved in order to get the hints and tools to escape. The room connected to the final door will be locked, in order to find the key, player will need to go through each of the other room, in a carefully planned order based on the hints he/she will receive. Otherwise, the player might be trapped, and this can happen in a variety of ways. For instance, there will be a fierce dog in one of the rooms, and the player will be warned by a danger sign as well as a sentence like, “You are approaching the door and you hear the barking from a starving dog.” The player will then want to make sure he/she has gotten the necessary tools (a delicious bone in this case) in hand before entering these dangerous rooms.

It is extremely important to think about the way that we are conducting the information to the readers/players of our text game. Just like mentioned in the New Narratives, we are currently transitioning to a digital age, where hypertext is becoming more and more popular and powerful than the traditional printed books. Our text adventure game kind of lies in the middle ground of the constructive and the exploratory hypertext. The players won’t be able to modify the overall structure of the game, that is, the rules of the game is fixed, and this is the exploratory aspect of the game. However, the player will “develop a body of information which they map according to their needs, their interests, and the transformations they discover as they invent, gather, and act upon that information”, which makes the text adventure game a constructive narrative as the same time.

In our team, Jake is an Economics major as well as the only native English speaker, and thus is a better communicator than Duoyang and me, so he will probably be writing more about the narrative and the text for the background story. Duoyang is an Electrical Engineering major, and is good at planning the storyline and the logic behind the scene, and thus will be doing more of the storyline planning. As a Computer Science and Engineering major, I really enjoy and am good at coding, thus I am very happy to contribute more to the programming part of the game and try to see how we can make the game more interactive and visually appealing to the players from the coding perspective. There are lots of benefits of working collaboratively in a group of three. Since the three of us come from different backgrounds and fields, we have a variety of expertise and thus can cover each other’s weakness. In addition, while we are trying to make everyone do some of everything (planning the storyline, writing the narrative, programming the game, etc), we can learn from each other and improve ourselves in the areas that we were not as good at as the other two. However, it is sometimes challenging to make all three of us make similar contributions in every aspect of the game, as we always tend to stay in our comfort zones and only do what we feel comfortable doing.

Below is a sketch of the storyline of our text adventure game:

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