coding – Humanities Now!

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.

Carly Pavoni

Carly Pavoni is from Fairfield, CT. She is a freshman at Bucknell University that is undeclared in the arts and sciences school. She is on the track and field team at Bucknell University.

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.

Megan Koczur

Megan Koczur is a sophomore student at Bucknell University. She is a member of the Bucknell Swim and Dive team and intends on majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. She resides in West Chester, Pennsylvania with her her father, mother, sister, Erin, and two black labs, Brandy and Max.