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.
