Before 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.

 

The 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.