If Text Then Code

Markup Cleaner

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At the beginning, I was more interested in doing challenges like CSS and I believe it might be another time for me to get more familiar with this useful tool. While, at class, Professor provoked my thought of standardizing all the markups for Linn letters. I have to admit that she made it and this attracted me to adventure in another unexplored field of digital humanity.

Looking at 194 pages abounded with colorful markups, I made a lot effort before starting it like battling, struggling, and panicking. In my mind, to create a criterion, I should be fully apprehensive of the journal in general. I tried to read through it to get an extensive picture. But when I daydreamed about pounding the table, shutting down the computer, and leaving the room with my condescension and disdain, Professor gave me another way out by creating an excel that lists every tag. My following job was about this “Excel Guide”.

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I mainly focused on the tag <state> which, I believe, is a relatively difficult one to conquer. Unlike <persName> or <objectType> which is all but nouns and names, <state> is more up to individuals not only because it is about adjective but also because people’s tastes and perspectives vary a lot. For example, “beautiful” often describes an appearance of a person or an outlooking of objects. In the context, it says “the weather is beautiful”. But that editor thought it describes the author’s mood as the reflection on the weather with more contexts related. Another example is about “brilliant” which should depict a person’s intelligence, but it actually means “the weather is brilliant”. So what I did is to divide all of them into two categories: one is for person and the other is for weather, predominately based on its first-handed meaning; like “beautiful” and “brilliant” in the above, I tagged both of them as for weather. While the third type in <state> column is like the word “crying”. I treated them more of an event which can illustrate people’s feeling, and in this case, it shows the author is sad. But to make everything simplified, I deleted all of them decisively and resolutely like a real leader.

Next, what I did is to look through every markup and correct them in various ways. The prime principle is “less is more”. A lot of tags like arms, wood, and coffee, are deleted for their uselessness, although each of them appears more than 5 times in total. The second rule is “one for all”. The word “house” does have different meanings in different situations and can be marked up as object or place. But because the characteristic of a noun which is not as complexed as an adjective, I marked up all of them as <placeName> for consolidation. To some extent, this makes a lot of sense. The third one is “linkup”. The purpose of marking up the Linn letters is to serve researchers who can easily grasp the basic idea and understand author’s “idioms” or proper nouns that are previously introduced. For instance, some people marked “battery” as an object due to the lack of background, which ought to be a place. Another example is “Roanoke” which stands for “Roanoke Island” and is a highly frequent word. So “linkup” refers to the second markup to give another category for those words sharing similar meanings like for all the boats, and it is still amazing to me that “Inquirer” is a name for a boat.

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Ella and I both worked really hard on this final project. She focused more on writing the wonderful and precise editorial page and the tag <persName>. I focused on rest of tags. To be honest, in the middle of the project, I did regret what I had chosen. But at last, everything works out perfectly. I look myself as a markup cleaner to make everything organized. Picking useful and inflammable sticks only makes the campfire even brighter.

Marking up Linn

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At the beginning, I signed up for a letter that John Blair Linn wrote to James Merrill Linn, which is extremely scratchy and I have no idea what I have run into until  Dr. Jak  acki said that letter is untranscribable and then I had to pick up another “easier” one. It, however, made no difference to me but I still appreciated that. I joked with my roommate that I can barely read an article even if it is printed, but now I have to transcribe handwriting written in a war over 150 years ago. For example the word “concubine” which means mistress appears in the letter but we do not use it any more. This increases the difficulty of transcribing and also Italic that I am not familiar with. It is incredibly frustrating that made me no way other than to ask the professor for help and I started to focus on markups then.capture

After touching the real letter, I was impressed as preserved so well that I can’t tell it is from 150 years ago if not being told. Personally I prefer the material page rather than the digital one although it doesn’t help that much to me. But when I was looking into the actual page, I could understand why he wrote some letters in specific ways. For example, some letters at the right edge is very squeezed because the paper he wrote on is not a proper rectangle and some part of the paper is destroyed, so we have to guess during transcribing. The material page can always tell more relevant information instead of just text, like smell, texture of paper, ink from the opposite side, etc. However, using  material pages can have some disadvantages like that digital one can zoom in much more than a magnifying glass and is more portable. There is only one authentic work for every antique. If I have no access to it, I would email the person in charge of the Archives and ask him or her to look at some words that confused me. Then based on that person’s view, I then decide whether to check it by myself or not12
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The letter I worked with is James Merrill Linn wrote to his brother John about the the result and the detailed information of a recent battle he took
part in. This is why the former letter he wrote was 6 days before and in that previous letter, he described the weather, clouds, bank of a river and all beautiful and enjoyable nature. While the letter right after 10th of March, on 11th, it aimed to tell John he was safe and no incidents happened that day. Also the letter included more opinion Merrill Linn issued. For example why the battle in North Carolina would be hard to win. What’s more is that he discussed reasons of a southern women association formed which is related to  The Emancipation Proclamation that was signed in September. His feeling changed through the letter he wrote from relaxing  before a  battle, to nervous and anxious because they foresaw a larger battle was waiting for them and this might be the last time for them to hear from home.

TEI- another way of reading

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TEI is another new thing to me, and I don’t even know its full name. But I do know what it refers to and asks for after finishing two TEI assignments.

In Poe assignment, I was luckily assigned the final part and also the most important plot of a detective and horror short novel written by Poe. Because of the characteristic of a detective novel, there are many different people, places, and events that I can mark up, and each person or place does not show only once. What I did is to categorize them and give them a same “dress”. While at the beginning, it was not as easy as I thought of. For the reason that TEI asks for markup, only fully understanding the whole text can help to find which person is important enough to be marked up, or which event is crucial to develop the story. Just as Pierazzo says “The challenge is therefore to select those limits that allow a model which is adequate to the scholarly purpose for which it has been created.” (Pierazzo, p466-p467) TEI is wonderful because anyone can give any word a distinct category, but it doesn’t mean that we have to mark everything up. That limit could help us fully use TEI, and build a pellucid context.

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Unlike Poe assignment, Declaration of Independence exercise is simpler but it shows how powerful TEI can be. What I find significant is <listRelation>. In Wikipedia text, the description of Hopkins’s family is every cumbersome which seems to show off the narrator’s newly-got grammar skills and put all sentences in a mess combination with all different names that no one knows where they come from. While TEI can simply list all of them with relationships with Hopkins. (shown below)

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What I have worked with is a short novel written by Poe. Now try to imagine that if the text is Harry Potter, although one person can do all the text analysis, and it sounds fun to do, the efficiency is quite low. Thinking about Poe assignment, one can just read all the markups to grasp the basic idea of the text. This is much more helpful, especially when cooperating with each other on very obscure context. What’s more is that TEI has special categorizing power. Browsing articles would fail to understand what “she” or “that” refers to when it is the main object in “event” markup. TEI can easily mark “she” and “that” up to make them more sense to cooperators. Showing another side of multifunctional TEI, Declaration of Independence exercise turns a pool of information into a microchip. Instead of reading 10-page “brief” introduction, TEI really makes an abstract out of it and helps readers get a better understanding of the context not only because the way is faster, but also because TEI connects one to another. In Digital Scholarly Editing written by Rasmussen (p128), there are three levels of “reading in relation to digital texts”: “level of manipulation”, “level of comprehension” and “level of interpretation”. These three levels are just three steps to build up a TEI. How it works totally conforms to how people read. There is no reason that TEI does not help.

 

Reflection

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In 2022, the player and two other students who have graduated from Bucknell University for two years. The set of another two virtual characters is for giving advice and help to the player, then the player could decide which of guide he or she may follow. The background is about implementation of the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was signed by US government in 2018. The economy situation gets worse and worse for the tremendous decrease in exports and imports for this act, and the unemployment rate gets another highest level comparing to the Great Depression. The three main characters are struggling in living for both student loan and hyperinflation. At this time, all three go back to Bucknell campus, seeking for any job that might be available. They accidentally find a letter lying in the mailbox they used to use. After playing number guessing game, they finally open the mailbox. The letter says: “follow the whale”. They start a journey to work for a gang in Hong Kong to steel an artifact in a museum to make money. The main conflicts are to avoid being noticed for example choose a discreet movement, and to open the safe case using Caesar cipher.

Due to the definition of “exploratory hypertext” by Joyce,  which means the text itself is changing every time with the reader’s reaction. This functions on our project. The player should read the instructions and understand the facial expressions of virtual people. Then he or she might give a corresponding action whether to pass by or to talk to them naturally to cover his or her identity as a thief. “Collaborations are both the work itself and the series negotiations between collaborators that govern the work’s creation.” (Rettberg, P194) Our game ,just like collective work, needs a lot of collaborations between the player and the other two virtual characters which are set by code. While we communicate by codes and series of texts and choices.

There are many benefits to work in Group 2. I am a first-year and this is definitely the first time I deal with computer science, and Dale has experienced a lot with Python, so he is the main director of codes. Ella and I are in charge of thinking and modifying the main story line and writing the text in the game. While, the biggest challenge for me to work collaboratively is to understand what the concept they were talking about. The cultural difference is unavoidable for example when we were brainstorming, they could easily talk about hundreds of movies that I have never heard of before. While finally, we didn’t apply any one of them and agreed with the story now it looks like.

The whole idea is inspired by the game I played during class called “Sherlock Holmes and the Indecipherable Cipher” in playfic.com. So we also put some other virtual characters to give some clues to the player, decreasing the difficulty of the game and directing him or her to what is supposed to do, other than doing a lot of codes to cover every possibilities. Also “follow the whale” and the character’s name “Neo” are inspired by the movie “The matrix”. “Follow the whale” gives the player the direction and clue what he or she needs to do next and shifts the set location to Hong Kong. But why Hong Kong? It is just for the reason that based on my knowledge Hong Kong is the right place to steel artifacts and breeds lots of gang.

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The game is going to be reality.

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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.