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theTEIexperience

November 3, 2016 by Matt Fay

mattBefore 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.

 

matt2The 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.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections

Declaration still shaping the World

November 2, 2016 by jaa023

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.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections

TEI In Action

November 2, 2016 by Julia

For my first TEI assignment, I worked on Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. I had never read this short story before, and Poe is not the most clear author of all time.  By marking up any type of writing, the encoder will gather a deeper understanding of the text by noticing certain words, researching ideas, etc. Personally, marking up the text while reading it required me to read closer than I would have normally. I defined words that I did not know rather than skipping them over because of the unknown importance of the word. I also noticed how this piece of writing differed from other texts that I had marked up in the past. My section of “The Pit and the Pendulum” was lacking persName altogether, which in other texts is very prevalent. I noticed how common state and trait tags were becoming in my markup. These were aspects that I would not have taken screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-5-15-49-pmnotice of had I not been the encoder of the text.

The encoder also has the distinct responsibility to decide what will be included in the markup and what will not. As Pierazzo wrote, “informed decisions need to be made on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted” (Pierazzo, 467). It is up to the discretion of the encoder of what to include, and with “The Pit and the Pendulum” I thought it would be most relevant to markup more state and traits than objects because of the tone of the text.

The Declaration of Independence assignment called on a different side of TEI mark up. This required more research on the part of the encoder than it had with Poe. Due to this, it allowed the encoder and reader to better engage with the text. Prior to my screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-10-50-33-pmmarkup on Roger Sherman I did not know anything about him, not even that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Rather than the reader just acknowledging a list of names who signed the Declaration of Independence, they can gain insight into the lives of each man and learn facts such as where he was born and the name of the college he attended. While some of these facts may seem pointless, it is still better to have more knowledge of something than less, and a project like this will make that available.

Ultimately I believe that engagement similar to the ones with Poe and the Declaration of Independence are extremely helpful to better understand the text. As Rasumssen wrote, “reader roles are a function of how we manipulate and interpret an edition’s texts, and so fulfilling each role involves action at two levels: the level of manipulation and the level of interpretation” (Rasmussen, 128). The text is in the hands of the encoder. What they include and what they omit is up to their discretion, but even simply making these decisions engages the encoder with subject matter more intently.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections Tagged With: Declaration of Independence, Pierazzo, poe, Rasmussen, TEI

TEI- another way of reading

November 2, 2016 by Neil Lin

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.

capture2

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)

capture3capture1

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.

 

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections

TEI – Text Analysis and Data Management

November 2, 2016 by Jingya Wu

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).”

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-8-21-59-pm

(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.

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-8-41-40-pm

(My Declaration of Independence exercise)

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections Tagged With: Data, markup, TEI, text

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HUMN 271

Bertrand 012
TR 9:30-11:20am
Dr. Diane Jakacki

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