As I started to mark up my transcription, I started to really put together how everything was interconnected. At first I was simply reading a memoir and it felt like anything else I would read but marking up the transcription and highlighting people, places, and things like emotions made my connection with the transcription deeper. When reading something casually, it’s easy to miss emotions, and especially when reading something personal like a memoir these emotions are very important. Emotions allow us to see what the writer was going through and can really put us in the place where he/she was when writing the memoir. When really looking at the places, it’s really interesting to see where the people in these memoirs lived and traveled to. We can see these areas today especially places like London, but can only imagine what it would be like for them at that time. Lastly, highlighting each person and their connection to John Willey allowed us to see how many people John had affected through his life and work. These markups have helped me understand these transcriptions on a deeper level and connect to them.
Our memoir in particular had three people working on it at the same time. This meant in order for us to have consistent mark ups we needed to collaborate and decide what was worthy and what was not. One of the main challenges that I think was prominent in other memoirs as well was terms like Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, Savior, Saviour, and Lord. Our group decided to make Jesus the person’s name, and the rest all role names. This is seen in one of the screenshots below where I have “Lord” marked up as a role name. In some cases it was harder for my group to come up with what to do about emotions. We decided that including emotions that was not felt by a particular person would not be marked up. For example, in the pictures below we can see I marked up emotions like dread and guilt, because that is what John Willey was feeling. I agree with Elena Pierazzo when she talks about how uploading a document on the web requires much more and different things compared to a published document. This is because editors need to do much more like markups and what exactly they need to include and exclude. I also agree with her that there is so much more that one can do with a computer compared to a published document. Coding allows us to mark emotions, places, people, dates, and much more up in order to organize information that would not be available on the computer. 
Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.
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.
