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.
The process of marking up my transcription has affected my understanding of the text. Throughout this process, I have read my text (Samuel Tippet) many different times in many different ways\forms. The original reading was reading it online through the original document which was a bit difficult to decipher. Next, I read while transcribing what the document had said. After this, I had to proofread what I had transcribed as well as my other group members to make sure it had made sense with no errors. This is when I read the whole story and it all came together. Next, with creating the timeline it pointed out the “landmark” events in Samuel Tippet’s life such as where he was born, marriage, and more. Tagging things such as a person, place, and emotion pointed out the most important people to my group members and I. It pointed out what people were mentioned the most, the most popular places as well as what emotions he was feeling throughout his memoir which were mostly negative unfortunately. He was a sad man that turned to God in order to help him throughout his life journey.
For what it is I have come to terms with the Moravian Lives complexity on its ideas and modes of representation because one must use what was given to them to their fullest and understand that everything will not be as a simple to plot. The way that I have come to terms is by understanding the complexity of it and seeing that there won’t be a clear cut answer to solving the timeline. With the modes of representation that were used was geography, in which was used to understand the land of the areas that Latrobe use to live, and chronology, in which helped our group to be more organized in seeing the flow of time. Which both have clarified Historical events that happened during the time period. There are times where these modes can obscure small or some important details that are not told to why things led to these events.
forces of disorder occupy the forefront of attention in which things happen to people rather one in which people do things.” (pg.12) For example, with Minards chart of the Russian campaign gives a “complex, but sometimes paradoxical way in which a real story is told.” (pg.23) It allowed me to see the story at a different angle in how this event transpired during that that time. Starting from a huge army then having most of the army wipe out by the winter season was told by single timeline of a line that thinned out overtime.
