Although I didn’t do any transcribing of this letter in particular, the transcribing of letters with our teams in class was an incredibly frustrating experience. We were asking each other what we thought each word was and, for the majority of it all, had no idea what Linn’s words said. Having no experience with transcribing before, I can say that it felt like being thrown into a new game on the hardest difficulty while being blindfolded and having to use the controller with your feet. Needless to say, I felt very fortunate to have to transcribe my own letter; however, as I looked at the transcribed letter and compared it to the original, I was actually making out the words much better. This left me with an understanding that transcribing is really just a skill like any other that can be polished through experience. I’m sure if I ever do more in the future it would get less and less frustrating.

Visiting the Archives was a really cool experience. It was almost surreal how much easier it was to read the physical letter as opposed to the digital images of the letter. The words appeared to be so much clearer and using a magnifying glass to enlarge the words proved to be significantly more effective than zooming on a computer screen. As for the tradeoffs of each, obviously it is much more convenient to have the digital version due to its portability, but as already mentioned the quality is decreased. The physical copy is easier to read and clearer, but in order to transcribe, one would have to visit the archives and view the letter. So in the event that one does not have access to the archives, one would have to rely on the digital version for transcription or somehow get in contact with someone that works at the archives to assist with the transcription.

In regards to the topics of Linn’s journal versus this letter, it appears that the people surrounding him are the main subjects of his writing. There is no journal entry after the date of my letter, but as for the one before, he’s describing Captain Shawl and his drunkenness. In the letter I encoded, he writes about all of the men he knew that had died in the previous battle. This small sample of Linn’s writing that I have seems to indicate that he rarely writes regarding himself, which is interesting because he’s writing for himself but not about himself. Also, it feels like Linn’s writing doesn’t carry much emotion with it. Both the way he writes about Captain Shawl and his fallen comrades have very blunt, unemotional tones. It makes me wonder whether he was just an unemotional person or if he simply lacked the skills to fully convey his emotions through his writing.

I believe that the engagement offered by TEI encoding helps you to better understand subject matter. It forces you to pay close attention to the text you’re working with and understand it on a deeper level.

For example, the Poe text had me searching for aspects of the narrative that were connected which turned out to be a difficult process. You have to go beyond the surface level and dive into the text in order to produce meaningful encoding, something that I have never really done nor been good at doing. During the encoding process, I found persName and desc tags to be helpful since it was much easier for me to understand and markup those aspects of the text. These enabled me to process what I already had a grasp of and to decide how to strategize comprehending and encoding the remainder of the text.

The Declaration of Independence assignment wasn’t as challenging as the Poe assignment since it didn’t have the same focus on deep reading. Instead, it served to provide more background on the people involved in the signing of The Declaration of Independence. I think the ability to markup a person helps provide context to a text. For instance, I gained a better understanding of not only Richard Henry Lee from encoding his personal information, but also colonials in general. Families tending to be much larger and miscarriages occurring more frequently help to contextualize aspects of the times when this document was written. Someone reading this text encoded document can quickly look at this encoding and gain an understanding of someone who helped contribute to the birth of this nation and someone who was simply part of that nation.

Rasmussen’s definition of a co-worker is someone that “seeks to go beyond the user and reader roles, and to contribute actively to the scholarly enterprise.” Under this definition, we have been thrown into the co-worker role and although it wasn’t necessarily willingly, our Poe and Declaration of Independence assignments can be seen as a contribution to the scholarly enterprise. Rasmussen later states that “one must be a reader in order to be able to be a user, and one must be both a reader and a user in order to be able to be a co-worker.” So in our utilization of TEI encoding and embodying the Ramussen’s co-worker role, I believe we were essentially forced into developing a better understanding of the text we were working with. In order for us to effectively encode the text we were working with, we had to work through the levels of reader to user to co-worker in order to gain a satisfactory level of understanding of the material.

Our project takes a slight spin on the standard criminal fiction/detective story. Instead of following the story of the detective attempting to solve a crime, the player takes control of a criminal who has just committed murder. The criminal/player is guided through the story by a narrator that acts as a voice in the criminal’s head. The narrator will instruct the player on what to do given in a given situation and the player has the option of going along with the narrator or defying him. For example, as the player, you may encounter a detective that begins questioning you about the night of the murder where you would then choose to tell the detective what the narrator wants you to tell him or not. In the case where you do not listen to the narrator, you end up arrested and the game ends. We don’t have a very clear picture of the events that will occur later in the story, but we do know that at a certain point the narrator will begin to mislead the player and if the player cannot recognize that he is being misled, then it’s game over. This creates a conflict in the player’s head because for a long duration of the game, trusting the narrator is the right option and then suddenly the narrator begins to abuse that trust.

I can’t speak for my other group members regarding motivation behind this concept for our game, but my own motivation stems from the game Portal. Similarly to our game, the player has a guide, but instead of a narrator, the guide is an artificial intelligence. This AI constantly reinforces that the player will be rewarded with cake once all of the puzzles are completed; however, it turns out that the cake is in fact a lie and this AI attempts to kill the player (the scene below is the scene of the player’s attempted murder). The introduction to Literary Gaming states that “literary computer games combine poetic and narrative techniques with serious, self-critical game design in order to explore the affordances and limitations of rules, challenges, risks, achievement-drivenness, and other ludic structures”. I view our game as a way to explore a similar concept to that of Portal and recreate it with the narrative focuses that Literary Gaming mentions. Ideally, our game will force the player to think “Who should I trust?” through the choices of the story and engage them through the storytelling as opposed to standard game elements such as puzzles that Literary Gaming would consider run-of-the-mill.

I think that working collaboratively on this assignment will contribute solid ideas to our narrative and help us create a satisfying product. It allows us to pool together more thoughts on the direction and other aspects of the story. Sarah and I started toying with the idea of a murderer being the main character to which Ethan expanded upon by adding the idea of a narrator helping to direct the player’s choices. Although we haven’t gotten to much of the coding as of yet I can see myself handing the majority of that because of my coding experience which will allow Ethan and Sarah to focus more on the story than how it will be implemented. The biggest struggle with the collaborative work will likely come when trying to meet and decide on later events of the story. My schedule is fairly busy being on the track team and I’m sure we’ll end up having some disagreements on story direction at some point.