Throughout the duration of my work with my memoirs, I have developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of digital humanities. I also became very familiar with my memoir throughout each process that I went through, whether it be transcribing, tagging, or converting my transcription into an html text. Through these processes, I was also able to get a more in depth understanding of the way the digital humanity community works and realized just how complex this work can be.
My understanding and familiarity developed throughout the time that I worked with my memoir; I learned more and more each time I examined the text. At first, during my transcription, I would say that I developed a basic understanding of my memoirs; when I transcribe I am more objective towards the transcription itself, not the analyzation of the text. After transcribing the text, my understanding deepened as I read over my transcription, making sure that it was coherent. I became interested in the words that I had no familiarity with and proceeded to research them. For example, when I came across “Gnadenfrei,” I didn’t know if it was a person, place, or event, but after researching the word I became familiar with the city. The next stage, developing my timeline with my group, brought on an even more involved/developed familiarity and understanding of not only my text but also of the memoirs that my partners worked on; when we worked together outside of class, we shared interesting topics and events that were throughout our memoirs. Being able to link events in my memoirs to contextual events was enlightening; it provided more of a background into the lives of the original authors of my texts. Finally, when it came to marking up and tagging my transcriptions, I learned even more about my memoirs. I can most logically contribute this deeper understanding to the fact that tagging invites you to analyze each and every word in the text on a deeper level to then be able to categorize its properties and overall impact on the text overall. For instance, the sentence, “till he at last with Howling & bawling went to Eternity,” from my Benigna Briand memoir seemed to have greater meaning and impact when I tagged it to eventually be, “till he at last with <name type=”emotion”>Howling & bawling</name> went to Eternity,” causing me to be even more drawn to the emotion that really bring great meaning and have a great impact on the sentence. This impact that words and their functions can have on the text when analyzed is conveyed by Pierazzo when she states, “While some of these parameters correspond to graphic evidence on the writing surface (letter shapes, ligatures, graphic components), others represent meta-information, such as dimensions, or qualifications of words in terms of both semantics and grammatical functions.” (Pierazzo 468)
One of the most important parts and greatest learning experiences of my work with my memoirs was the collaboration that took place with my group. Working with a group provided great insight into how the digital humanities community functions; it is very rare that a person works alone within the community. From providing us with editorial freedom to allowing us to work out our problems within our group, the structure of the entire assignment was very beneficial to learning and developing my understanding of DH. As Pierazzo suggests, in digital humanities, because we have so many resources at our fingertips, we must establish how much is enough/too much (Pierazzo 463). It was mostly in tagging where we had to establish this. In my group, we had to make several editorial decisions, which were made unanimously and without disagreement or arguing. Some of the decisions we made together was to tag God and any reference to him as “persName” and any religion/religious group as “orgName.”
Working with these texts is a huge responsibility; the editor’s interpretation of the text is huge factor in how the text is represented and presented. As stated in Pierazzo’s work and cited from Meulen and Tanselle, “the transcriber’s goal is to make an informed decision about what is actually inscribed at each point.”(Pierazzo 465) I believe that through each process our project went through, I, as a transcriber, was able to make well-informed decisions as I became more and more familiar with my memoirs and my understanding of them developed and deepened.
Ethan Conklin is from a suburb outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is currently pursuing a B.A. in Spanish and Anthropology at Bucknell University. Ethan hopes to attend law school after finishing his undergraduate studies and is excited to see what the future holds.
1 reply on “Blog #4”
I also experienced a lot of important collaboration within my group, as well as a much deeper understanding. I really agree that each reexamination of the writing created a more thorough and contemplative understanding. I also agree that the process of the markup allowed for a much more constructive presentation of contextual events and showed a much greater connection between events occurring and emotions experienced in the text.