Pierazzo

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 notice 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-pm markup 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.

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

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.

TEI In Action

Markup Breakdown

Creative Commons License