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.

The purpose behind the previous two assignments was well met, and I now acknowledge how difficult, yet rewarding, text encoding can be. For the first assignment, I encoded the first segment of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Initially, I thought I would be able to markup the text just by scanning one sentence at a time. Soon after I began did I realize that I could not do sophisticated markup without first reading the entire segment. As I started adding tags after first reading the text, I could see how different pieces of this segment fit together.

For instance, I found using <trait> and <state> tags tricky, and I could only use them appropriately once I read both the text and the TEI P5 documentation. In my opinion, text-encoding is an iterative process which helps you truly understand the content. Ideally, you are scrutinizing each line to see if there is any possibility to add useful tags. Such a process even fosters research out of context. As an example, while doing the Declaration of Independence assignment, I had to look up websites other than Wikipedia to know more about the person I was assigned – Francis Lightfoot Lee. Even though the assignment had little to no reading, I read another article to best encode the personography, primarily <event> and <relation> tags, of Francis Lee.

Throughout the process, I kept referring to the following statement from Elena Pierazzo’s paper A rationale of digital documentary editions:

Secondly, if every editor necessarily selects from an infinite set of facts, it is evident that any transcription represents an interpretation and a mechanically complete record of what is on the page.

I glanced over how students had encoded other segments of Poe’s text, and realized how different the markup would have looked if it were done by someone else. Every editor has a unique style, and without establishing a strict standard as a team, a single text cannot possibly be marked-up the same way by two editors. While researching out of text, editors can derive their own meanings. Since there are boundless ways to encode text using TEI, different meanings may lead to “fundamentally incomplete and fundamentally interpretative” (Robinson and Solopova, 1993, p. 21) versions of encoding. At first, I was bogged down and could not decide the point where I should stop encoding. But then again, the only limits are “the limits of the imagination.” (Driscoll, 2006) So I went to bed.

In addition, I particularly connected with Rasmussen’s discussion of various reader roles. (K. Rasmussen, 2016) In relation to my work with Poe’s text, I acted as a reader to “understand the work in and through the texts of a scholarly edition” as well as a co-worker who “[took] part in the editorial work at some level.” However, contrary to what Rasmussen believes, one may not necessarily be both a reader and a user to be a co-worker. In such a short span, I did not function as a “user” because I did not focus on “other texts [segments] that explain or relate to the work,” i.e. The Fall of the House of Usher. While dealing with the second assignment, on the other hand, the distinction between my roles as a reader was a bit vague. I could have been playing the role of a “contributor,” not fully knowing the original work but still contributing to the project.