Tag: interpretation

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Blog #4

Blog #4

The past couple of weeks, my group and I have been doing a lot to try and transcribe the memoir of Elizabeth Grundy.  I am in a group of four and we each were assigned to 6 pages each.  It was very challenging being able to read the tough cursive. Having to read it so many times, I realized how tough Elizabeth Grundy’s life was.  She went through very much struggle and had to react in different circumstances. She also looked to God very much, asking for his help. Each group member was assigned a certain amount of pages of the memoir, so that aspect was individual, but we eventually needed to come together to create the timelines and when we started tagging everything.  We had to discuss and decide which words were tagged to which specific thing. One debate we had was whether Jesus, Savior, and Christ were going to be marked as “Persname” or “Rolename”. This was important because people have different beliefs, and we all needed to agree on the tag. We decided on “Rolename” so then we had to make sure everyone tagged those.  Another thing that we had trouble with was deciding what was considered “objects” and what we’re not. I originally did not know if every noun or thing was an object. We decided on only specific words being objects.  It took a while to tag each emotion and to decide the words.  Here is an example of the decision to tag God as roleName instead of persName.  It was an important decision to choose this and it worked out well for our group.

In the reading “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, the author states how she believes that a transcription is a form of translation.  Each transcription is translated differently so each author creates different transcriptions. There are many different features included in the process that help the transcription.  The author chooses their specific interpretation and they chose what to represent each and it changes based on the author’s vision. There are purposes of editors, which are similar to what we do with tagging.  We also edit by making sure the words match the same as the original document.

Here is an example of the different tags for each emotion.  It took a lot to find each and to physically tag each word.

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Blog #4

Blog #4

According to the article, “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, transcribing and editing to publish a digital edition are two separate processes. On page 2 of the article, Pierazzo says transcription is “ a derivative document that holds a relationship with the transcribed document, and [a digital edition is] a formal (public) presentation of such a derivative document.” These two products are also different from the original print because “they are intrinsically different with respect to traditional editorial models, especially those editions encoded according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)” (1). To think about it in terms of order, the print is the original source and is edited with pen and paper. And because of technology, transcriptions can be made online which digital editions edit and present.

Marking up the transcription of the Latrobe memoir has enabled me to do close reading and understand the text enough to analyze Latrobe’s emotions and social relationships. Having to tag keywords like emotions, names, places, and dates made reading the memoir easier to understand since I had to interpret myself what words would be considered such keywords. In order to interpret it, I had to understand her experiences. Thus, “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” (3). Based on my understanding, I had to choose which words would be considered emotions, places, etc, and thus my judgement and selection was how I interpreted the text. Not only did I have to decide on my own to some extent, but I also had to work with my group to set general standards and “informed choices on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted in features [like] semantics: dates, names of people, of places, keywords” (5). The hardest keyword categories for us were emotions and people because Esther Latrobe had experienced many hardships concerning sickness and she came from a prominent, religious family so her journal entries included a lot of expressions of pain and religious jargon like “Lamb of God”, “All in All”, “Son of God”. It was difficult to create specific standards for emotional expressions and names for God since they were not just singular words but phrases so it was tricky to define whether or not just the adjectives or nouns would be tagged. In the end, our group decided to tag entire phrases for emotion (including pain) and capitalized names for God whom we decided to count as a “person”. There were not any arguments in my group regarding the rule of thumb we made. We just constantly communicated with each other what we were tagging in our own sections of the memoir. The process of editing the transcription taught me that there is no objective rule we can follow to edit without bias or opinions. Pierazzo says, “we must have limits, and limits represent the boundaries within which the hermeneutic process can develop. The challenge is therefore to select those limits that allow a model which is adequate to the scholarly purpose for which it has been created” (5). Because editors cannot be objective, it is best to accept that and focus on interpreting transcriptions based on knowledge and informative decisions.

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Blog #4

Blog #4 TEI Tagging

We tagged God and its synonyms as a person. This emphasized how faithful Esther Latrobe was.

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.

This shows how we tagged people, places, emotions, and dates.

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)