The process of marking up the Esther Latrobe memoir transcription was certainly a tedious process, but definitely did affect the way I understood its content. When considering when to tag things like emotions, our group had to work closely to decide what we would qualify as an emotion and to do our best to keep the tags consistent throughout the transcription. Just as Pierazzo claims in her article, with each decision about what kind of things would be marked with what tags, we were forced to deeply interpret and contemplate what the text was communicating and through this we were able to understand the text in a much more elaborate way. Because our text relied so little on travel and so heavily on emotion and prayer, we had to depend a lot on each other to maintain the use of certain tags. After the markup was complete, it was really interesting to be able to see how often certain things come up and see what points in the transcription were more eventful. We were much more clearly able to see the points of illness and of great emotion in Esther’s life and see how proximal they were in relationship to other events. It was also valuable to learn about the XML markup system and seeing the process of our transcriptions becoming viewable web pages. One of the main points that is referenced numerous times in Pierazzo’s article is about the ability of the markup to capture as much detail from the original document as is possible on a digital setting. We were able to understand this idea by learning that each character serves a purpose in a markup and by moving one piece out of place, the whole thing changes. Lastly, we were also able to experience the back end of something used in everyday life, that I have personally never seen. To experience just how elaborate encoded material is and how different it is from what actually appears on a screen is eye opening to students like me who use their computer and phone every day without much thought about what is making it work the way it does. Overall, through the markup of the Latrobe transcription, we were able to not only gain a deeper understanding of the text but also learn about the process of encoding and the way that it plays into our everyday life.
