Take a Closer Look at Powell Diary

“Determining how and whether a work got included in the database was sometimes a subjective process. some of the decisions made could, and perhaps should, be challenged.” said Matthew Jockers in his analysis Macroanalysis Digital Methods and Literary History. Through the  process of marking up my transcription of Powell Diary, I understood his statement better.

I used to think editing is an easy job, which does not require much intelligent work and critical thinking. For magazine editors, they just need to search for articles that are related to the magazines’ topic and compile them together on the magazines. Having learned close reading and Prosopography, I now realize that editing is a huge work and demand collaboration, discussions and deliberation.

As Jockers said, some decisions of editing are disputable.  When we  work as teams, the disagreements become more noticeable since every individual has his/her own opinion on the affiliation of a word. For example, some might think garden is a place while some might view it as an object. Then how can we resolve these disputes with our teammates? First, through discussions, we can define the meaning of a word in the text and the meaning of “name, place, event, object, time, date, state, trait…” as clear as possible. Moreover, we consider who are our perspective readers and what are their purposes of reading our edited text. Take the example of garden. If our readers are average people who just want a general idea about  the life of Powell, we’ll mark “garden” as an object, which conveys the idea that Powell was decorating his garden. However, if our readers are researchers who want to make an analysis or route chart of Powell’s daily events, marking “garden”as place will make more sense. Also, coding give us more space than coloring (as we did in the google doc) because we can overlap the marking up of a few words in xml files. For instance, as shown below, in the xml file, the event “thro.ed it in the fier” overlaps the object “fier” while in the google doc, I can only mark the event as “thro.ed it” which is less informative than “thro.ed it in the fier”.

Jockers also pointed out that “metadata can also provide some insight into the content and style of novels.” Managing the metadata we collected from the coding of Powell Diary and creating a prosopography answer some questions about the diary. For example, from the person prosopography, we can find that the diary mentioned 53 male, compared with only 18 female, which means Shamokin in the 1740s was largely a man-dominant world.

Besides answering questions, metadata “raise more questions”, as Jockers indicated. I am surprised to see that there are very few pronounces in the person prosopography. Powell tended to address his friends by nouns instead of pronounces. What are the reasons? Is it related to some cultural norms of Native Americans or Moravians? The metadata points out a direction for further research.