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My TEI Experience

November 2, 2016 by PJ Onusconich

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.

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-8-07-36-pmFor 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.

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-7-59-50-pmThe 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.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections

The Only Limits Are The Limits Of The Imagination

November 1, 2016 by Yash Mittal

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.

(It is interesting to note that the first few paragraphs of the text called for extensive text-encoding, whereas the following paragraphs had multiple event tags. This is probably because the above segment set the foundation for the entire story, and thus required tags for all nouns. Is the same true for every story though?)

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.

doi
(Long list of Francis Lee’s family members encoded using <listRelation>. <relation> is also interesting because one can denote roles of the participants of a relationship using attributes such as active, passive, and mutual)

 

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.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections

TEI as a Close Reading Tool: Poe and Carroll

November 1, 2016 by Maureen Maclean

I have done TEI work in the past and I found the Poe work to be very challenging. A certain element of the difficulty I faced was in the text itself. There are not a lot of nouns in my segment; my whole piece was basically adjectives describing Usher and his madness. The lack of nouns were a challenge because it is so much easier to mark up, for example to tag “dog” than “trepidancy.” With all the adjectives, I assigned them tones for what I thought matched both their meaning and their use in the sentence. For example, Poe uses the word “spirit” a lot and switches between using it as synonymous of the mind and actual spirits or ghosts. I had to closely read the sentence and the greater paragraph and even the piece as a whole and make an executive decision as to what Poe meant. This decision-making about context relates to what Piezarro says about digital editions: 

“We should simply say that the notion of objectivity is not very productive or helpful in the case of transcription and subsequently of diplomatic editions and that we should instead make peace with the fact that we are simply doing our works as scholars when transcribing and preparing a diplomatic edition.” (Pierazzo 466).

As a scholar working on the piece, I decided what I thought was most important and based my tags on my research of the text as well as the context of the narrative itself. As Piezarro says, we have to distance ourselves from the notion of objective truth- our editions will be inherently subjective and we can’t be stuck on trying to make it “correct.” This is exactly what I did- I adjusted my knowledge and did the best that I could to make a scholarly edition. Going even further than that, it can be argued that there is not much room for objectivity in markups of literature as literature is inherently meant to be read in several different ways.

Poem section of my part of the House of Usher
Poem section of my part of the House of Usher

For the Poe segment, my most used tag was <desc type=”despair”> since so much of the piece was about the narrator describing his poor friend turn madder and madder. In hindsight, the abundance of dark, or strange adjectives shouldn’t have surprised me given that Poe is known for these tones. Another interesting part of my chunk was the poem at the end. After looking up TEI guidelines, I decided to mark the poem according to its rhyme structure and number the lines. This was a little bit tricky because I had to do a bit of research to figure out the poem’s rhyming and other poetic devices.

The Declaration of Independence segment was much easier than the Poe work. It was more straightforward as we had a template to fill out and it was considerable shorter. Additionally, I had a lot of background knowledge on my signer, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, because he was from my home town. The most qualitative part of the markup or the most customizable aspect was the event tag. That was a little challenging for me because Carroll did so much in his life worth meaning. However, I decided to pick the qualities that made him different than the other signers. For example, he was the only Catholic signer and the longest lived/last to die out of all of them (died at 95 years old). I also included a fun piece of knowledge I recently learned (from researching the history of my town for another class); at 92, Carroll laid the first stone of the B&O railroad (America’s first railroad) and thought that that moment was more important than his signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Carroll was heavily involved in politics and civil activities. He didn't retire from public servitude until he was 90 and even after he came out of retirement to participate in important state events.
Carroll was heavily involved in politics and civil activities. He didn’t retire from public servitude until he was 90 and even after he came out of retirement to participate in important state events.

In definitely believe that TEI markup helps you better engage and understand the piece you work with. It forces you to do research and ask questions about the piece; like what does this word mean and how does it relate to the context of the story or even simpler, is a bed a place or an object? As Rasmussen says: “Do we read digital editions or use them? The answer is obvious: we do both” (Rasmussen 133). This quote correctly states the complex interaction with digital editions or close readings. For the Poe work we both read the piece and used the context within it to inform our tagging. It was a little less clear in our work with the signers as we didn’t base our work on the actual text of the Declaration of Independence, but rather used the Declaration as a medium to provide biological information about the signers. However, it could be argued that we are “reading” the signer and based on the knowledge we gathered on their life, we made decisions as to what we thought would be useful or intriguing information for users looking at our published work online.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections Tagged With: Carroll, close reading, declaration, maureen, Piezarro, poe, Rasmussen, TEI

TEI fun

November 1, 2016 by Sarah Rosecky

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-5-33-24-pm
“Declaration of Independence” Caesar Rodney TEI markup

I believe that this kind of engagement with text helps us better understand the subject matter. Relationships between characters, places, and objects are better understood.

The work with Edgar Allen Poe and the Declaration of Independence assignments were vastly different from each other. Edgar Allen Poe wrote the “Tell Tale Heart,” and, instead of factual information, was creative writing. Therefore, using this to the best of my knowledge, I needed to know mainly, persNames vs. roleNames and objectTypes vs. placeNames. This is a challenge I had before when writing about James Merrill Linn. I had decided to make “old man” a roleName, even though, originally I had him as a persName. He was one of the main characters besides for  the narrator, but because they never referred to him as his surname or forename, he “old man” played just a role in the story. Also, at the beginning of the poem, this man was referred to as “old man” and as the poem progressed, he was referred to as the “victim,” which inherently I also made a roleName. Because this character took on so many different states in the poem, he was a very transient character, so he experienced many shifts in roles.

screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-5-33-53-pm
“Tell Tale Heart” EAP TEI markup

Another difficult part of marking up the “Tell Tale Heart” was distinguishing some objectTypes vs. placeNames. I ended up calling “floor,” a placeName rather than an objectType; the murder occurred in a bedroom and the victim was on the floor. The location of the victim was the floor, and I consider a location a place. People may disagree with this aspect of my mark-up style, but it is just a personal stylistic choice that I have made.

Working on the Declaration of Independence piece, I found it more tedious but more straightforward. We were given instructions one what was to be included and did not have much freedom in the style of our markup. I completely understand why this was the way it was. Because we were working on a collaborative document, there needs to be a sense of uniformity. On the “Tell Tale Heart,” I was working alone, so the stylistic choices I had made did not affect other members of my group. As Pierazzo writes, “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar” (465). For the second assignment, our works had to be cohesive. Also, especially because it is a historical document, it is important to only state factual evidence and facts. We were not working on a creative piece but rather a straightforward historical document.

Text markup during the “Tell Tale Heart” was much more about objective information and organizing the text into categories. During this markup, we had to be careful to make sure that it was just a “revision” of the original text and work. The “Declaration of Independence” text markup was more about providing information in a manner that was independent from other information in the work. When doing the “Declaration of Independence” project, we were essentially creating new work based off the old work, because we were adding new information. As Rasmussen states, “still, the boundaries are fluid here; only concrete individual assessments can determine whether it is appropriate to speak of a new work” (122). So, was are “Declaration of Independence” project a new work? Or was it just a new “edition”?

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections Tagged With: allen, declaration, edgar, independence, markup, of, poe, TEI

Markup Breakdown

November 1, 2016 by Dale Hartman

The first piece of text I worked with was section 5 of “Murder in the Rue Morgue”.  This particular assignment involved diplomatically and semantically marking up the source text.  Of those two components of the markup, the semantic tagging was the most involved by far, requiring much more thought going into every tag.  I think my markup was greatly affected by the content of this section of the text.  My portion of “Murder in the Rue Morgue” was very monologue heavy, with the character Dupin discussing his deductive reasoning involving the way the killer entered and exited the scene of the crime.  One interesting decision I made during my markup was to treat some of the verbs used by Dupin as well-defined events.

Examples of my event tags in "Murder in the Rue Morgue"
Examples of my event tags in “Murder in the Rue Morgue”

Whereas egress, descent, and my other event tags might be regarded as more general verbs in most contexts, Dupin talks about them as specific events in the timeline of the murder.

 

The question can then be raised: did the encoding of this text help me to better understand the subject of this writing?  I would have to say yes.  When simply reading Murder in the Rue Morgue, it’s easy to get lost in Dupin’s monologues, and lose out on important details of his deductions.  When doing a semantic markup on the text, you have to pull out those important details and really think on why they stand out in the text.  You have to understand what exactly is going on in the source text in order to create an effective encoding.  As Ramussen puts it, “in order to contribute actively to the edition’s production of knowledge, it is necessary to have prior knowledge of both the scholarly edition and the published work” (Ramussen, 128).

 

Our work on the personography of the signers of the Declaration of Independence forced us to work with a text in a very different way.  Instead of highlighting and marking up the information in the source text, our job was to bring in information from other sources and link them to the source in our edition.  This kind of encoding practically reverses the tagging we did in the Poe assignment.  Instead of finding important words in the text and appropriately tagging them, we laid out a system of important tags and then filled them with the correct information.

This kind of encoding most closely matches what Rasmussen defines as a “Knowledge Site.”  As she defines them, “Knowledge sites can thus better identify the relationship between

Linking information in TEI using unique tags
Linking information in TEI using unique tags

the work’s texts and other texts that relate to the work” (Rasmussen, 125).  Our edition of the Declaration of Independence was made of the source material and many smaller texts detailing the signers.

 

Overall, text encoding is a fantastic way of expanding knowledge about a particular text.  In the case of our works, we not only experienced detailing specific parts of the source text in the Poe assignment, but also bringing in and linking new information with the Declaration of Independence project.

Filed Under: Reflection #2, Reflections Tagged With: Ben Franklin, Declaration of Independence, Edgar Allan Poe, markup, Pierazzo, Rasmussen, TEI

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HUMN 271

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

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