Rasmussen

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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