Category: Blog #4

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Blog #4 TEI Tagging

We tagged God and its synonyms as a person. This emphasized how faithful Esther Latrobe was.

Marking up the Latrobe transcription has definitely increased my understanding of the text. During the transcription phase I felt that I had a decent understanding of my pages, but not the whole memoir. While marking up my section I got an even closer look at the text. The tagging focused on places, dates, names, events, emotions, objects, health, and organizations. It was fascinating to see that emotions dominated Esther’s memoir. Names, most notably synonyms for God such as Lord and Saviour, were also seen frequently throughout the text. I also felt that I got a better understanding of the whole text since I had to read through the entire memoir while checking for tags.

This shows how we tagged people, places, emotions, and dates.

Working with a group of peers is a challenge in this process. Since we had the longest memoir (40 pages), we had a larger group of six editors. Overall, I thought we worked well together, but we needed a lot of communication while tagging. For example, we decided to mark all proper nouns and synonyms of God as people. The biggest challenge was tagging emotion. We decided to tag any word that described a type of feeling as an emotion. We would check in with each other throughout the TEI tagging process if we were unsure about something. We’d ask about certain phrases or words to the whole editorial board, and then we would decide as a group if we thought it counted as an emotion or not. Hearing input from everyone and making decisions as a team was imperative. The markup of the transcription really made me realize how much editors do and how much collaboration actually happens on a project like this. Lack of communication and teamwork, and the whole project will be full of inconsistencies. As a group we didn’t really have disputes, but we definitely had to talk about how to tag certain elements of the text. Additionally, I have realized that the digital edition of a transcribed text is really just based on how the editor views the text, “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act.” (465 Pierazzo) Markups depend on what editors decide to tag and how they tag it. For example, “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar” (465 Pierazzo). Two people could interpret the text very differently and therefore produce two different versions of the same text. What we have created with our digital edition of Esther Latrobe’s memoir “is an interpretative, scholarly product, based on the selection of features transcribed from a specific primary source.” (Pierazzo 466)

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Mark Ups

        My group is transcribing writing from 18th century Moravian culture. If you were to look at my digital transcription and the original hand written document they would look incredibly different. Tanselle explains, “Obviously a transcription cannot exactly reproduce the relative precision of carelessness with which handwritten letters are formed or their relative sizes, or the amount of space between words and lines” (465). This point that no transcription will ever look exactly like the original document is important to keep in mind when observing my group’s specific transcription. My group of four people divided up the pages of Samuel Tippett’s memoir and each transcribed four or five pages. The fact that transcriptions cannot perfectly represent the original document implies that there is a lot of room for discrepancies when transcribing the same text. This means that even though my group is transcribing the same story, the way in which I approached and understood my pages is most likely very different  from the way the approached and understood theirs. Pierazzo further supports this point by explaining, “The process of selection is inevitably an interpretive 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” (465). When we went back to our transcription and began the process of mark ups, it provided us with a way of linking our texts together both logically and stylistically.

        When deciding how we wanted to mark up our transcription the hardest element was keeping everything consistent. Michael Hunter explains, “An electronic edition is like an iceberg, with far more data potentially available than is actually visible on the screen, and this is at the same time a great opportunity and a temptation to overdo things” (467). Having the meeting to go over our guildlines was important to make sure our pages matched. The two hardest elements to keep consistent were deciding how we would mark dates and emotions.  Dates were presented to us in a few different ways. Sometimes we would be given a date saying “In the year 1754”. Other times, it was presented without the word year in front of the date, and the final way included the day and month. Eventually, we decided that in our mark ups of dates we would include months, days, and years (like 1754) and we would leave out the word year or years in the mark up. That was a simple decision, but the decision on how we would mark up emotions was much more complicated. Constantly throughout our memoir, Samuel Tippett used words and phrases like, “love”, “heart have felt”, “something in my heart”. All of these phrases seem as if they are portraying emotion, but we did not decide to tag all of them. We decided that we would only tag words, classified as emotions, which are directly related to Tippet himself. This allowed us to not go crazy in our task to tag emotions.

                

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Blog Post #4

Transcribing Esther Latrobe’s memoir has opened the doors to a deeper understanding of her life. At this point in the course being able to distant read gave me information from a bird’s view to summarize a large portion of text such as our 44 pages of Esther’s memoir. However, now being able to read through each word and designate a tag for it gave me a new meaning of Esther’s memoir. Although it was a unique and challenging experience, I have learned a lot from being on an editors side during this process.

Designating a tag for each word is not as easy as it may sound. As a group, we had to learn how to determine the labels for controversial words. We questioned if we should tag “Lord” and “God” as people. After reading Elena Pierazzo’s article I realized that our group was not alone with these debates on how and what to choose to tag. She states that “the question how to choose” is common in this process and we “must have limits” (466). To figure out these limits our group came to the conclusion to tag people if it was capitalized within the text. We believed that Esther meant these religious figures to be people if she capitalized it. Looking this carefully as the text made me question what Esther was trying to refer to, which gave me a new insight into her life. She believed Lord and God were people as she was very spiritual. Without making these editorial decisions and reading on a micro scale, I don’t think I would have as good of an idea of her beliefs as a person.

Another editorial decision our group came across was how to differentiate between tagging an emotion and health related word. Esther was sick the majority of her life for her memoir. This caused a lot of words to be related to illness, symptoms and feelings. Our group had to decide what “decision will reflect the purpose and intended use of the transcription” (471). We made rules in our group google docs to clarify and keep constant throughout our encoding process. Pierazzo’s statement “To achieve the purpose of the edition and meet the editors’ needs, one needs to ask which features bear a cognitive value, that is, which are relevant from a scholarly point of view” made me realize the true importance of what my group, as editors, were doing (469). If there were questions on if something should be tagged as an emotion or health, the context of the word was read aloud and decided as a majority vote. Whatever one had more of an importance for the overall meaning of the text was typically decided.

Having team members to double check you and clarify any confusions is a big help however working with a group takes a variety of large types of communication. For our coding of our memoir to be successful and meet our overall purpose, we had to be tagging the same types of things.

 

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Blog #4

Through marking up my memoir and rereading it multiple times, I was able to gain a better understanding of the main topics Elizabeth Grundy was trying to portray throughout. In the process of adding tags on certain words, I was able to determine the most frequently used tags; Elizabeth Grundy used people and role names frequently in her memoir. As stated by Pierazzo, “a digital edition can represent many more features than a print publication can,” (Pierazzo 472). She spoke often of her son and some form of God. By doing this, I was able to come up with an idea of the important things in her life; she always made her son a priority and focused on religion everyday. Although the web provides all of these features, sometimes it still lacks features only printed texts can provide. Pierazzo says, “the web has some limitations: we cannot, for instance, reproduce easily some of the calligrammes,” (Pierazzo 472).

In the beginning of the transcription process it was easy to divide up the pages that everyone was assigned to transcribe. Each group member was responsible for 5-6 pages, and every member had their transcriptions finished by the due date. It got harder once we were each assigned with adding tags to our transcribed pages. This part was confusing at first and involved a lot of talk among my group members and I. One member was absent during the class period when we were finishing the tags and did not have it finished in time for when the final file with everyone’s changes were sent out. I was unsure as to how I was going to receive their changes. After experiencing this, I can imagine working in a much larger group with members across the globe makes it very difficult to compile everyone’s work into one space and make the changes necessary throughout the project. Communication is key when participating in group projects, and in larger projects, it is vital that group members complete tasks by the specific due dates otherwise things begin to get much more confusing than they need to be. After completing this project, I have a better appreciation for edited texts and a better understanding as to how they are produced. I use code for my major constantly, and it was interesting to see one of the many things code can be used for as most of my projects in computer science are very different.

Another difficulty our group faced was the decision involving which words should be given which tags. We spoke in class and created a google doc. This document contained the rules to determine the tags of questionable words. These words related to the different names for God and words similar to son or mother. We decided these names for God would be considered role names and words similar to son and mother would not be considered names. If there was a question a group member had during marking up the memoir, they would ask the group during class, and it was get answered. We did not face any difficult decisions during the mark up. Similar to this, we also had to determine whether or not we would change spellings in the memoir to make them correct. Pierrazo states in her article, “Austen’s favoured spellings have been preserved and marked, such as the inversion of the diphthong,” (Pierazzo 469). When transcribing texts to make them accessible on the web, it is difficult to agree on the many rules each member needs to follow during their transcription.