Category: Blog #4

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Blog #4: Markup

We have done different type of reading on the same text and each time, there is more information being extracted. For the markup project, we conducted a very close reading and attempted to identify specific things, such as names, places, dates, events, etc. This project required more collaboration than ones before since we all had to agree on what to tag and what not to. As mentioned by Pierazzo, two readers could have two different interpretations of the same text. To solve this issue, we discussed as a group and formed rules/guidelines using Google Docs on what should and should not be tagged. There were no disputes amongst the group after this. Collaborating on this project was necessary since it helped eliminate the bias of having only one person work on the whole project.

The close reading required for this project allowed me to see more details about Samuel Tippett’s life. An important event in his life is his father’s death when he is young. This helps as readers understand Tippett even more. It also allows us to look at other people who were a part of his life, locations he travelled throughout his life and how he conveyed his emotions. We went more in depth during this project than we did during the initial transcription, as the transcription was just a private edition. This markup publication helps us get closer to the diplomatic edition that was mentioned in the reading, where we try to recreate and digitalize the initial text. It is not yet a perfect diplomatic as it is missing many of the ‘facts’ but it provides much more than the raw texts that comes with just transcribing and we have the option to change the codes of the XML file to make it look similar to the original text.

Going through the text word by word to determine the markup necessary then reading the context of that specific word, phrase or sentence helps us engage with the text. It is not just mindless reading, we actually had to engage with the text to figure out what needed to be tagged and what did not. The most difficult part of this project was deciding what to tag, such as do we mark any of pronouns that refer to God or Jesus as a person name, we decided not to. There were emotions and events that our group deemed too vague to be tagged. After marking up the texts, we compiled it as an HTML file, making it look similar to a webpage.

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Blog #4

In her article A rationale of digital documentary editions, Elena Pierazzo, a revered worker at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College in London, reflects upon the question: are digital editions different from printed ones? At first glance to a citizen who has never worked in the fields of digital humanities, digital mediums seem to present the materials in the same manner as printed texts. However, Pierazza adamantly argues that “editions as we know them from print culture are substantially different from the ones we find in a digital medium” (Pierazza).

 

A first major factor to consider is the price of publication. “In a digital environment, the cost of publication (though not necessarily that of production) has been remarkably reduced and therefore an increasing number of such editions are now being published on the web” (Pierazza). Consider the efficiency of publishing digitally. Once the product has an online URL, the reader can paste this URL and find the desired edition through Google in the blink of an eye. A person does not need paper or ink for an edition that can be printed through the internet.

 

“The concept of transcription largely consists in a systematic program of selective alteration coupled with selective preservation of information” (Pierazza). Pierazza’s article discusses Michael Sperberg-McQueens’s declaration that there is an infinite set of facts related to any work being edited. This statement brings up a traditional argument regarding the pros and cons of graphical analysis and standard literature. Reading texts directly from an article encourages the phenomenon of close reading. The reader is forced to pay closer attention to the minute details mentioned by the writer. However, when texts become long and concepts become more sophisticated, the sheer amount of intricate details detract from the overall point of the text. The read thus experiences a bottleneck effect; the human brain can only process a finite amount of information within a given moment. For this reason, digital editions offer a better alternative to print culture. Digital editions allow an editor to select what relevant context needs to be altered and what information is arbitrary. Although Pierazza claims how digital editions are superior, she never claimed that this process of editing was easy.

 

We have been using TEI-compliant XML markup to edit our transcriptions as a collaborative group effort. Our group specifically worked on our previous transcription of Esther Latrobe’s memoir. The way the software that we used worked was based on a tagging system. You would highlight the desired word or phrase that you wanted to tag and then categorize it from the following list: person, place, organization, date, emotion, event, health, or object

 

 

The picture above displays how the program compiles a list of every tag in a convenient and organized manner. This organization adheres kindly to the brain’s tendency to recognize patterns. Personally, the list of tags related our transcription back to Latrobe’s main theme of religion. Our most common tag was a person. Since God was the most important “person” in Latrobe’s life, our group decided to make any mention of the lord considered to be a tag as a person. The sheer amount of “persons” we tagged shows Latrobe’s intimate connection with God. However, the process of tagging this document proved harder than expected.

 

Although our group was filled with brilliant people, not all brilliant minds can think alike. By this statement, I mean that we had to write down laws specifying what were the qualifications that determined each tag. 

 

 

Even though the picture above is unfortunately blurry, it reflected upon a problem within tagging that my group encountered. Due to the fact that Latrobe lived in a family of six children, her memoir uses the word “brother” a lot. However, some of the times the word “brother” would be capitalized. We tagged the “brother”s that were capitalized and did not tag the ones that were not. In this decision, we made any proper nouns considered to be a person.

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Blog #4

Blog #4: Extracting Entities

The process of marking up my transcription has bettered my understanding of Harriet Lee’s memoir because I feel I now comprehend the information that is embedded in our memoir. We already practiced distant reading, where I was able to get a broad overview of the text, so after marking it up and using TEI (very close reading), I was able to see the small details as well as the big picture. This combination of distant and close reading is called differential reading, which really helped me understand the text that I have been working with. I was able to come up  with my own interpretation of the text, which I recognize would be different from any other individual because “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar (Pierazzo 465). The richness of the mark-up of text shows intellectual engagement. This is due to the fact that the extent of how an author marks up a text reflects how we interpreted what the author is saying. Each person has their own, unique interpretation and their own judgments and thoughts, which is demonstrated through the richness of textual mark-up. We worked to create a diplomatic edition, “a published version of a transcription
which reproduces as many of the characteristics of the original document as the medium permits or as the project requires” (Pierazzo 473).

Collaborating with Paige as an editorial board has changed my understanding of how edited texts are produce. In fact, my opinion on the entire editorial process has changed. There were so many little, but critical decisions we had to make when deciding what to mark-up.  As discussed in “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act: 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” (Pierazzo 465). I did not even consider this prior to this module. In order for us to have well-versed and consistent mark-ups, we were in constant conversation with one another. We would frequently ask each other questions on what specifically to tag something as, so that our work remained homogeneous and would provide us with a more accurate result in the end. We discussed the words/phrases that we were unsure about and compiled a list of our decisions on a Google Document, so we could refer back if the problem arose again. When knew discrepancies came up, we would decide how to tag something based off the precedent of our past decisions.

We decided not to tag “Saviour,” “Lord,” or “Holy Spirit” as a person because we decided that we would only tag concrete things and there is some skepticism revolving around religious figures. Likewise, we decided not to tag “heaven” as a place because it is not tangible. We also decided not to tag words like “sister,” “brother,” or “doctor” as they are too general and do not refer to a specific person. In certain contexts when it was not “she went to church” (a place), we treated it as an organization because it was referring to a group of people who share the same beliefs. By doing this, we tried to remain as objective as possible. ‘Thus we may conclude
that there is such a thing as objectivity of interpretation:
the vast majority of decisions

Prior to this module, I did not realize how tedious editing digital texts can be. I learned that it was very important for Paige and I to properly save our files and edit in the proper documents to ensure that we were both working in the most up-to-date version and did not lose any valuable changes.

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Blog #4

Blog #4

According to the article, “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, transcribing and editing to publish a digital edition are two separate processes. On page 2 of the article, Pierazzo says transcription is “ a derivative document that holds a relationship with the transcribed document, and [a digital edition is] a formal (public) presentation of such a derivative document.” These two products are also different from the original print because “they are intrinsically different with respect to traditional editorial models, especially those editions encoded according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)” (1). To think about it in terms of order, the print is the original source and is edited with pen and paper. And because of technology, transcriptions can be made online which digital editions edit and present.

Marking up the transcription of the Latrobe memoir has enabled me to do close reading and understand the text enough to analyze Latrobe’s emotions and social relationships. Having to tag keywords like emotions, names, places, and dates made reading the memoir easier to understand since I had to interpret myself what words would be considered such keywords. In order to interpret it, I had to understand her experiences. Thus, “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act: 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” (3). Based on my understanding, I had to choose which words would be considered emotions, places, etc, and thus my judgement and selection was how I interpreted the text. Not only did I have to decide on my own to some extent, but I also had to work with my group to set general standards and “informed choices on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted in features [like] semantics: dates, names of people, of places, keywords” (5). The hardest keyword categories for us were emotions and people because Esther Latrobe had experienced many hardships concerning sickness and she came from a prominent, religious family so her journal entries included a lot of expressions of pain and religious jargon like “Lamb of God”, “All in All”, “Son of God”. It was difficult to create specific standards for emotional expressions and names for God since they were not just singular words but phrases so it was tricky to define whether or not just the adjectives or nouns would be tagged. In the end, our group decided to tag entire phrases for emotion (including pain) and capitalized names for God whom we decided to count as a “person”. There were not any arguments in my group regarding the rule of thumb we made. We just constantly communicated with each other what we were tagging in our own sections of the memoir. The process of editing the transcription taught me that there is no objective rule we can follow to edit without bias or opinions. Pierazzo says, “we must have limits, and limits represent the boundaries within which the hermeneutic process can develop. The challenge is therefore to select those limits that allow a model which is adequate to the scholarly purpose for which it has been created” (5). Because editors cannot be objective, it is best to accept that and focus on interpreting transcriptions based on knowledge and informative decisions.