The Humanities Now!

Category: Blog #4

  • Close Reading – Powell Diary XML Markup

    At first, the Powell Diary was not a very meaningful text to me. I felt distanced from the content and did not quite fully understand what was going on or what the significance was. However, through the process of constantly marking the text up, at first in the google doc and eventually in Oxygen, I…

  • 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…

  • A Deeper Understanding through Marking Up

    The process of marking up has introduced a whole new realm of close reading that I was unaware of. When analyzing almost every word and deciphering them into categories, you can gain a new and deeper understanding of the text rather than simply reading it in print, which is what Pierazzo talked about in her…

  • Closer than Just Regular Reading

    When it comes to reading just any material, close reading isn’t the first thing that jumps into your head.  Reading a body of work usually consists of starting at the top of the page and reading the at least most of the words.  Close Reading is a completely different story. Using Oxygen to make a…

  • The Powell Diary Takes on Oxygen

    After transcribing our Powell Diary pages, we then went through and color-coded specific meaningful words in order to then easily markup our transcriptions in the program Oxygen. Before we as a class were able to transfer our marked up transcriptions into Oxygen however, we had to create a Google doc where decisions could be made…

  • Categorize the data

    Close reading in digital humanity is a little bit different from the traditional reading process. From my own experience, it is a process of categorizing rather than information gathering. Elena Pierazzo values this categorizing process a lot in her report. “For print the choice of which features to include in the transcription is limited largely…

  • The Process of Editing Texts

    “The process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act: what we choose to represent and what we do not depends either on the particular vision that we have of a particular manuscript or on practical constraints.” (Elena Pierazzo 2.1) Through collaborative work on the transcription of the Powell Diary along with applying TEI-compliant XML markup…

  • #tagging

    The close reading of a text can in some cases reveal much more substance than other methods. In the case of the Powell diary, close reading has enabled us to learn about the lives of Shamokin residents, both native and Moravian, in great depth. According to Pierazzo, we conducted a diplomatic edition; a transcription that is…

  • 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…