Tag: Elena Pierazzo

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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

     Marking up my transcription was actually an integral aspect to my understanding of the text. I feel as if being able to analyze the text through breaking down different aspects of the words was really helpful in that it made me feel closer to the actual words and meanings of the text itself. Instead of just reading every small word individually, I was able to see how every word shaped the overall meaning of the text due to tagging.

     I feel as if the Bethlehem memoirs in specific were important with regards to the aspect of understanding how the memoirs interrelate. Our memoirs were different from the other memoirs in that we had several different authors all from the same relative time period, rather than just one single memoir. This method of marking up was also unique with our Bethlehem memoirs in that we had varying accounts of mentioning the word “Lord”, “Savior”, or ”Jesus”. To remain consistent throughout, we decided as a group to tag any occurrences of the Holy Spirit as a person. We had to make some cuts on what should be considered tangible, and what should not be considered taggable. As Pierazzo says, “informed choices need to be made on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted” (Pierazzo 467).

     Collaborating with the rest of my editorial board (group) also heavily influenced my perspective on the memoirs as a whole. I feel as if when it was just me editing my own memoir, I had a single perspective on which words should be tagged. When I gave it to the rest of my group to revise , they pointed out aspects of my memoir that I hadn’t previously considered taggable, and thus I was able to get a more full sense of my memoir.

     I really enjoyed using TEI with my memoir. I think Pierazzo summarized it best when she said “to all intents and purposes there is no limit to the information one can add to a text—apart, that is, from the limits of imagination” (Pierazzo 466). Using technology to actually be able to analyze all accounts of different aspects of these memoirs was an invaluable opportunity, and is a “much less limiting” medium to engage in analysis. (Pierazzo 464).

     I also believed that learning how to use this software gave me a strong insight on how to apply to this to other literature that I may encounter. I have gotten a much firmer understanding of html and how computer processes and systems work, so I feel like I have a more diverse approach to the digital humanities now. I now have a knack for transcription AND a knack for using the technology associated with analyzing those said transcribed texts.

    Overall, I believe that I have a much more complete and wholistic grasp on the Bethlehem memoirs, but specifically that of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I now understand more of why she did what she did because I tagged different aspects of her emotions and her health. When I had read the memoir previously, it seemed a little dry, and I was confused about the sequence of events that occurred and why they happened. Now I know how Anna’s emotions and state of mind shaped her journey working in Jamaica on the Mesopotamia plantation.

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

As a group working on the Bethlehem memoirs, it was difficult to decide how to transcribe and tag our memoirs considering they were all authored by different people. In order to remain consistent, we decided to use the original format for the texts as best we could and include the ampersands and original spellings for words such as “Saviour.” In addition, we kept where the author capitalized random words. This was a decision made by all group members and it was one that was very difficult. We struggled to find the line where our decisions were altering the texts significantly. As Pierazzo emphasizes Driscoll’s point in the article, Driscoll says, “we might conclude that one possible and tempting answer to the question ‘where to stop’ could be ‘nowhere’, as there are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded. Nevertheless such an answer opens the field to more theoretical and practical concerns” (pg. 466). The marking up of these transcriptions has enabled me to understand that though portions of the original document are present, they are still being altered. Our transcriptions of the Bethlehem memoirs have been changed to be better understood by the reader and in some ways that could affect the originality of the texts.

With the members of my group, we decided to tag “Jesus,” “Saviour,” and “Holy Ghost,” as people to remain consistent in our TEI model. Also, we thought that it was a good idea to change our abbreviated terms like “Br.” to the full word of “Brethren.” This process was most interesting to me in this project because it felt like I, personally, was bringing my transcription to life. Pierazzo explains this process of tagging in the best way possible by stating, “The output displays the transcribed text as closely as possible to the original document, but it is the scripts that store the knowledge (the scholarship) of how to produce such an edition. One might use a culinary metaphor here: the source contains the ingredients, the scripts contain the recipe, and the output represents the cooked dish” (pg. 473). I was identifying the key terms and encoding them at the same time. In the article written by Pierazzo, she explains how, “One of the reasons why the TEI model is particularly effective is because it enables the encoding and transcription of several alternatives for the same segment allowing, for example, the encoding of abbreviated forms along with the expanded ones, or of erroneous passages and their editorial corrections” (pg. 473). Overall, we hadn’t encountered any disputes about our markup decisions because we had collectively agreed to use similar tags and worked closely on our own individual transcriptions. Each document was different, except for the way we decided to format it.

 

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Blog #4

Blog #4

Over the past few weeks, our group has been focused on transcribing the Grundy memoir and we just finished tagging it up. These two steps are what Pierazzo refers to as the creation of the diplomatic edition: “The two products will possibly contain the same text, but while the first will be a private product, the latter will be a publicly published one”(464) – the first product being the marked up version of the transcription and the second one being the published version. Marking up the memoir gave us a new understanding of it. While we were transcribing it, we only got vague understandings of our portions that we transcribed. However, once we went back and read the entirety of the memoir, we then knew what Elizabeth Grundy was writing about. The markup was what really helped us piece together some of the emotions Grundy felt. Just reading some of the text and solely focusing on picking out emotion really made me feel a connection to Grundy. These selections for tags are what helped us understand the text. Pierazzo describes the process of selection as, “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). For us, the process of selection was to introduce us to tagging and to help us gain a deeper understanding of the text.

 

The process of collaborating as an editorial board really made me understand how much goes into producing texts. Communication is essential when working as a part of a team. When we first began marking up our pages, we had to figure out how we wanted certain things tagged. In a Google Document, we wrote down some of the general tags we had to talk about. We decided that if a name had a prefix before it (ex. “Br.” or “Revd.”) then we would include the prefix as a part of the tag. We agreed to tag indirect names (ex. “My daughter” or “My son”) only if the real name of the person had been tagged. The one we probably discussed most about was how to tag God, Savior, and Lord. Some group members believed they should be tagged as a person name whereas some members believed they should be tagged as role names. Eventually, we agreed to have it tagged as a role name. A quote from Pierazzo actually describes this situation perfectly: ‘An ‘‘i’’ is not an ‘‘i’’ because it is a stroke with a dot over it. An ‘‘i’’ is an ‘‘i’’ because we all agree that it is an ‘‘i’’’(466). Overall, I feel as if it were fairly simple being able to communicate with a group of four to complete this task, but that once you start working with more people and larger documents, then it really could become difficult.