Tag: diplomatic edition

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

Through transcribing Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir I have gained a strong grasp of her life. Distant reading has allowed me to take the 23 pages of her memoir and condense the writing into a short summary. Additionally, creating tags for each individual words had given the memoir a completely different feel when you read through it. These tags help to clarify Grundy’s writing, which helps the reader follow along better and gain a stronger understanding of the memoir. Creating tags was a difficult and tedious process, and some hard decisions had to be made, but they bring so much to the writing that it is worth the process.

For me the process of marking up my transcription has given me a deeper understanding of the text, and has allowed me to get a better feel for what Grundy’s life was like. Adding tags to our group’s transcribed memoir is what Pierazzo calls 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). It was tough to choose which words to tag and which ones to leave out. The tags give the transcriptions a lot more detail that makes it easier for the reader, but if you overuse the tags, their purpose will diminish. “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. When so many possibilities exist, there is a danger of technological considerations of what can be done taking priority over intellectual considerations of what is actually desirable or necessary in any particular case”(Pierazzo, 467). Our group in particular had a problem with deciding whether or not we should tag the words “brother”, “sister”, “son”, and “daughter”. Our transcriptions were already filled with tags and we felt that these words would not be beneficial as we would  be overusing tags. In almost every instance in Grundy’s memoir where one of these words appears, Grundy explains who it is that she is talking about so there is no confusion, which made it easier to decide that we should leave these words untagged. Creating this diplomatic edition has added a lot of nice features to my groups transcriptions, but there are certain features that inevitably cannot be preserved through the process of transcription. “Some characteristics of the manuscript are irredeemably lost by transcribing it, for instance the variable shape and spacing of handwritten glyphs versus the constant shape of digital fonts or typescripts”(Pierazzo, 464). Aside from this, the entire process of creating a diplomatic edition of Elizabeth Grundy’s original memoir has given me a deep look into her life, and I have a strong understanding of what it was like.

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Blog #4

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

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.