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Blog #4

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.

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Blog #4

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.