These past couple weeks, Jacob and I used Oxygen XML editor tools to mark-up our sections of the John Willey transcription. We did this by using tags to give a category for each significant word; for example, we categorized names, emotions, and places. This taught me more about each specific word, whereas with distant reading I was just given a general overview of my text. By paying attention to the categories frequently appearing, and the words within those categories, I gained a better understanding of the context in which Willey lived. One example of this is when studying Willey’s emotions, he mostly had positive, happy words described of how . However, when looking at his health, it was mostly negative terms representing illness and suffering. Putting these two together you can see Willey was dealing with illness, however, maintained a positive outlook on his life to those around him.
Through working on this process with my peers, I learned a bit about how editorial boards are produced. One issue my group and I had was how to maintain consistency of our tags when we each work on different sections. One particular category that we had trouble with was tagging “rolename” vs. “persname.” For example, we had to choose if Lord, God, saviour and Jesus are “persnames” or “rolenames.” However, as Pierazzo states, “if scholars as competent readers agree on something, then by this definition that thing is objective” (466). Therefore, we had to choose this difference on our own, and agreed that Jesus, Savior, and God would be “rolenames” while Jesus would be a “persname.” This made sense to me and my group, because many people have different definitions of who God is, whereas Jesus was known to be a person, just with differing views of his ability. Pierazzo refers to “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act” (465). I can definitely relate to that, as me and my group certainly interpreted how we felt our tags would be most useful and make the most sense.
When referring to digital versions of text, Elena Pierazzo proposes the question: “Do they represent an advancement of textual scholarship or just a translation of the same scholarship into a new medium?” (463). Through my first read through the text, I would have said that digital texts were virtually the same as printed. However, with printed texts there is no way to dig deeper into the reading. This allows for scholars to gain the best, most thorough understanding of the text. Specifically, being able to use tools like Oxygen XML editor allowed me to dig deep into the meaning of each specific word. There is no better way to gain a thorough knowledge of a text than specifically analyzing each word read.
file:///Users/tylergeorge/Downloads/HUMN100_Moravian-TEI/HTML/index.html
Tyler George is a political science and history double major at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Tyler formerly attended Lincoln-Sudbury high school, in his hometown, Sudbury, Massachusetts. Tyler plays club hockey at Bucknell, and also participates as an Army ROTC cadet in the Bison Battalion.
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. 
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. 