As a group working on the Bethlehem memoirs, it was difficult to decide how to transcribe and tag our memoirs considering they were all authored by different people. In order to remain consistent, we decided to use the original format for the texts as best we could and include the ampersands and original spellings for words such as “Saviour.” In addition, we kept where the author capitalized random words. This was a decision made by all group members and it was one that was very difficult. We struggled to find the line where our decisions were altering the texts significantly. As Pierazzo emphasizes Driscoll’s point in the article, Driscoll says, “we might conclude that one possible and tempting answer to the question ‘where to stop’ could be ‘nowhere’, as there are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded. Nevertheless such an answer opens the field to more theoretical and practical concerns” (pg. 466). The marking up of these transcriptions has enabled me to understand that though portions of the original document are present, they are still being altered. Our transcriptions of the Bethlehem memoirs have been changed to be better understood by the reader and in some ways that could affect the originality of the texts.
With the members of my group, we decided to tag “Jesus,” “Saviour,” and “Holy Ghost,” as people to remain consistent in our TEI model. Also, we thought that it was a good idea to change our abbreviated terms like “Br.” to the full word of “Brethren.” This process was most interesting to me in this project because it felt like I, personally, was bringing my transcription to life. Pierazzo explains this process of tagging in the best way possible by stating, “The output displays the transcribed text as closely as possible to the original document, but it is the scripts that store the knowledge (the scholarship) of how to produce such an edition. One might use a culinary metaphor here: the source contains the ingredients, the scripts contain the recipe, and the output represents the cooked dish” (pg. 473). I was identifying the key terms and encoding them at the same time. In the article written by Pierazzo, she explains how, “One of the reasons why the TEI model is particularly effective is because it enables the encoding and transcription of several alternatives for the same segment allowing, for example, the encoding of abbreviated forms along with the expanded ones, or of erroneous passages and their editorial corrections” (pg. 473). Overall, we hadn’t encountered any disputes about our markup decisions because we had collectively agreed to use similar tags and worked closely on our own individual transcriptions. Each document was different, except for the way we decided to format it.
Olivia Smith is a student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She was born and raised in Manasquan, New Jersey. She is currently apart of the Bucknell Women’s Rowing Team and plans to major in Psychology and Creative Writing.
