Tag: Elizabeth Grundy

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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

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.

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Blog #4

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.

 

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Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3

The chronology of events is very important if you wish to see the cause and effects of each event, which Grafton emphasizes in this writing.“By comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work” (Grafton, 15). Through chronology, we are able to view changes that have happened over the years, and why it is that they changed. There are an endless number of ways to create timelines, and each of them reveals different information about a sequence of events, and they can incorporate images and other media.

Along with chronology, timelines show geography which tells viewers where the event happened, along what time it happened. “Timelines are relatively new sources of information, only formed as they are today in the middle of the 18th century”(Grafton, 19). Timelines are relatively new, so different ideas and methods of making timelines are always being created. In this case, creating a timeline of events to view Elizabeth Grundy’s life helps to view her life as a whole, and gain a better and more full understanding of what it was like to be her. Grafton would agree that graphic visualization is one of the most helpful tools, if not the most helpful when it comes to organizing information into a concise set of data. “Graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information” (Grafton, 10).

Here is a specific event from the life of Elizabeth Grundy that my group and I incorporated into our timeline. This was when Grundy was in her 50’s, five years after she had moved to Dukinfield. She started up a girls school, with eleven girls all belonging to families of the Brethren church.

This photo shows a few of the most common illnesses in the 1700’s. We chose this because in her memoir, Grundy talks about the death of multiple family members which led us to believe there was a problem with sickness at this time.