Blog #4

Over the past few weeks, our group has been focused on transcribing the Grundy memoir and we just finished tagging it up. These two steps are what Pierazzo refers to as the creation of the diplomatic edition: “The two products will possibly contain the same text, but while the first will be a private product, the latter will be a publicly published one”(464) – the first product being the marked up version of the transcription and the second one being the published version. Marking up the memoir gave us a new understanding of it. While we were transcribing it, we only got vague understandings of our portions that we transcribed. However, once we went back and read the entirety of the memoir, we then knew what Elizabeth Grundy was writing about. The markup was what really helped us piece together some of the emotions Grundy felt. Just reading some of the text and solely focusing on picking out emotion really made me feel a connection to Grundy. These selections for tags are what helped us understand the text. Pierazzo describes the process of selection as, “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”(465). For us, the process of selection was to introduce us to tagging and to help us gain a deeper understanding of the text.

The process of collaborating as an editorial board really made me understand how much goes into producing texts. Communication is essential when working as a part of a team. When we first began marking up our pages, we had to figure out how we wanted certain things tagged. In a Google Document, we wrote down some of the general tags we had to talk about. We decided that if a name had a prefix before it (ex. “Br.” or “Revd.”) then we would include the prefix as a part of the tag. We agreed to tag indirect names (ex. “My daughter” or “My son”) only if the real name of the person had been tagged. The one we probably discussed most about was how to tag God, Savior, and Lord. Some group members believed they should be tagged as a person name whereas some members believed they should be tagged as role names. Eventually, we agreed to have it tagged as a role name. A quote from Pierazzo actually describes this situation perfectly: ‘An ‘‘i’’ is not an ‘‘i’’ because it is a stroke with a dot over it. An ‘‘i’’ is an ‘‘i’’ because we all agree that it is an ‘‘i’’’(466). Overall, I feel as if it were fairly simple being able to communicate with a group of four to complete this task, but that once you start working with more people and larger documents, then it really could become difficult.