A New Perspective

The past two weeks have greatly enhanced my appreciation for the work that goes in to marking up a text, which in our case was our Powell Diary transcriptions. I had no idea how much detail is behind a marked up text. I think that the most fascinating thing is that the average person is blind to all that transpires. As a class, we spent a lot of time marking up our individual transcriptions using XML-TEI. The categories we used included times, dates, places, and events, along with a couple others that did not appear as often.

Throughout this process we had to make compromises as a class pertaining to how we marked up certain words. These compromises also included what constituted certain words as being part of one category verses another. This correlates with Elena Pierazzo’s point that some characteristics would be lost in the process of transcribing a manuscript and marking it up. This was due to the fact that we all had different texts and were all presented with different situations. Having a google doc that was shared among the class made it easier to keep track of what we had agreed upon and it also provided us with a place to put questions we had while outside of class. We were definitely able to work as a team and I think that is a very realistic side to marking up and coding texts.

There were also individual compromises that we had to make with ourselves. We all had to decide how far to go with marking up this texts. As Pierazzo says in her article, there is no limit to the information that someone can add to a text. I personally decided that not every single word had to be marked up. On the contrary, I decided that some events needed to also be marked with a type, while other events did not need to be.

It was great to be able to see our final product online and to know that all of our hard work and detail paid off. The most rewarding part of all the work that we put in was not however the final product itself; it was that it became a part of the website that we have been using as a class all semester long. We did something that with the Powell Diary that has never been done before and in the process learned skills that we can continue to use outside of the classroom and further in our lives. Pierazzo also says in her article that a digital edition is completely different than a print-based one because it is structured completely different. Through using XML-TEI I was able to realize that have a greater understanding of it.

This was and interesting portion of this class not only because it required more work and attention from us, but also because it required our class to work as a team both inside and outside of the classroom.