Marking up the Latrobe transcription has definitely increased my understanding of the text. During the transcription phase I felt that I had a decent understanding of my pages, but not the whole memoir. While marking up my section I got an even closer look at the text. The tagging focused on places, dates, names, events, emotions, objects, health, and organizations. It was fascinating to see that emotions dominated Esther’s memoir. Names, most notably synonyms for God such as Lord and Saviour, were also seen frequently throughout the text. I also felt that I got a better understanding of the whole text since I had to read through the entire memoir while checking for tags.
Working with a group of peers is a challenge in this process. Since we had the longest memoir (40 pages), we had a larger group of six editors. Overall, I thought we worked well together, but we needed a lot of communication while tagging. For example, we decided to mark all proper nouns and synonyms of God as people. The biggest challenge was tagging emotion. We decided to tag any word that described a type of feeling as an emotion. We would check in with each other throughout the TEI tagging process if we were unsure about something. We’d ask about certain phrases or words to the whole editorial board, and then we would decide as a group if we thought it counted as an emotion or not. Hearing input from everyone and making decisions as a team was imperative. The markup of the transcription really made me realize how much editors do and how much collaboration actually happens on a project like this. Lack of communication and teamwork, and the whole project will be full of inconsistencies. As a group we didn’t really have disputes, but we definitely had to talk about how to tag certain elements of the text. Additionally, I have realized that the digital edition of a transcribed text is really just based on how the editor views the text, “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act.” (465 Pierazzo) Markups depend on what editors decide to tag and how they tag it. For example, “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar” (465 Pierazzo). Two people could interpret the text very differently and therefore produce two different versions of the same text. What we have created with our digital edition of Esther Latrobe’s memoir “is an interpretative, scholarly product, based on the selection of features transcribed from a specific primary source.” (Pierazzo 466)
Jessica Hom is currently a sophomore at Bucknell University. At Bucknell, she plays on the varsity softball team and is currently undeclared. She is from Syosset, NY and is a graduate from Syosset High School.
When looking at the tools that are given it seem that these tools would help us understand more on these research questions. The reason is that many of the traditional tools are usually pen and paper that has only one copy of existence. But in the Digital age that we live, a person is able to access things more quicker and understand the connections of the terms and their usage in that text better and faster. We are able to compare and contrast between text better in finding the differences and “digital technology (help us) search for patterns and trace broad outlines.” (188)
