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.
Carly Pavoni is from Fairfield, CT. She is a freshman at Bucknell University that is undeclared in the arts and sciences school. She is on the track and field team at Bucknell University.