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Blog #4

Blog #4

     Marking up my transcription was actually an integral aspect to my understanding of the text. I feel as if being able to analyze the text through breaking down different aspects of the words was really helpful in that it made me feel closer to the actual words and meanings of the text itself. Instead of just reading every small word individually, I was able to see how every word shaped the overall meaning of the text due to tagging.

     I feel as if the Bethlehem memoirs in specific were important with regards to the aspect of understanding how the memoirs interrelate. Our memoirs were different from the other memoirs in that we had several different authors all from the same relative time period, rather than just one single memoir. This method of marking up was also unique with our Bethlehem memoirs in that we had varying accounts of mentioning the word “Lord”, “Savior”, or ”Jesus”. To remain consistent throughout, we decided as a group to tag any occurrences of the Holy Spirit as a person. We had to make some cuts on what should be considered tangible, and what should not be considered taggable. As Pierazzo says, “informed choices need to be made on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted” (Pierazzo 467).

     Collaborating with the rest of my editorial board (group) also heavily influenced my perspective on the memoirs as a whole. I feel as if when it was just me editing my own memoir, I had a single perspective on which words should be tagged. When I gave it to the rest of my group to revise , they pointed out aspects of my memoir that I hadn’t previously considered taggable, and thus I was able to get a more full sense of my memoir.

     I really enjoyed using TEI with my memoir. I think Pierazzo summarized it best when she said “to all intents and purposes there is no limit to the information one can add to a text—apart, that is, from the limits of imagination” (Pierazzo 466). Using technology to actually be able to analyze all accounts of different aspects of these memoirs was an invaluable opportunity, and is a “much less limiting” medium to engage in analysis. (Pierazzo 464).

     I also believed that learning how to use this software gave me a strong insight on how to apply to this to other literature that I may encounter. I have gotten a much firmer understanding of html and how computer processes and systems work, so I feel like I have a more diverse approach to the digital humanities now. I now have a knack for transcription AND a knack for using the technology associated with analyzing those said transcribed texts.

    Overall, I believe that I have a much more complete and wholistic grasp on the Bethlehem memoirs, but specifically that of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I now understand more of why she did what she did because I tagged different aspects of her emotions and her health. When I had read the memoir previously, it seemed a little dry, and I was confused about the sequence of events that occurred and why they happened. Now I know how Anna’s emotions and state of mind shaped her journey working in Jamaica on the Mesopotamia plantation.

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Blog #4

Blog #4

Throughout the duration of my work with my memoirs, I have developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of digital humanities. I also became very familiar with my memoir throughout each process that I went through, whether it be transcribing, tagging, or converting my transcription into an html text. Through these processes, I was also able to get a more in depth understanding of the way the digital humanity community works and realized just how complex this work can be.

My understanding and familiarity developed throughout the time that I worked with my memoir; I learned more and more each time I examined the text. At first, during my transcription, I would say that I developed a basic understanding of my memoirs; when I transcribe I am more objective towards the transcription itself, not the analyzation of the text. After transcribing the text, my understanding deepened as I read over my transcription, making sure that it was coherent. I became interested in the words that I had no familiarity with and proceeded to research them. For example, when I came across “Gnadenfrei,” I didn’t know if it was a person, place, or event, but after researching the word I became familiar with the city. The next stage, developing my timeline with my group, brought on an even more involved/developed familiarity and understanding of not only my text but also of the memoirs that my partners worked on; when we worked together outside of class, we shared interesting topics and events that were throughout our memoirs. Being able to link events in my memoirs to contextual events was enlightening; it provided more of  a background into the lives of the original authors of my texts. Finally, when it came to marking up and tagging my transcriptions, I learned even more about my memoirs. I can most logically contribute this deeper understanding to the fact that tagging invites you to analyze each and every word in the text on a deeper level to then be able to categorize its properties and overall impact on the text overall. For instance, the sentence, “till he at last with Howling & bawling went to Eternity,” from my Benigna Briand memoir seemed to have greater meaning and impact when I tagged it to eventually be, “till he at last with <name type=”emotion”>Howling &amp; bawling</name> went to Eternity,” causing me to be even more drawn to the emotion that really  bring great meaning and have a great impact on the sentence. This impact that words and their functions can have on the text when analyzed is conveyed by Pierazzo when she states, “While some of these parameters correspond to graphic evidence on the writing surface (letter shapes, ligatures, graphic components), others represent meta-information, such as dimensions, or qualifications of words in terms of both semantics and grammatical functions.” (Pierazzo 468)

One of the most important parts and greatest learning experiences of my work with my memoirs was the collaboration that took place with my group. Working with a group provided great insight into how the digital humanities community functions; it is very rare that a person works alone within the community. From providing us with editorial freedom to allowing us to work out our problems within our group, the structure of the entire assignment was very beneficial to learning and developing my understanding of DH. As Pierazzo suggests, in digital humanities, because we have so many resources at our fingertips, we must establish how much is enough/too much (Pierazzo 463). It was mostly in tagging where we had to establish this. In my group, we had to make several editorial decisions, which were made unanimously and without disagreement or arguing. Some of the decisions we made together was to tag God and any reference to him as “persName” and any religion/religious group as “orgName.”

Working with these texts is a huge responsibility; the editor’s interpretation of the text is huge factor in how the text is represented and presented. As stated in Pierazzo’s work and cited from Meulen and Tanselle, “the transcriber’s goal is to make an informed decision about what is actually inscribed at each point.”(Pierazzo 465) I believe that through each process our project went through, I, as a transcriber, was able to make well-informed decisions as I became more and more familiar with my memoirs and my understanding of them developed and deepened.

    

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

As a group working on the Bethlehem memoirs, it was difficult to decide how to transcribe and tag our memoirs considering they were all authored by different people. In order to remain consistent, we decided to use the original format for the texts as best we could and include the ampersands and original spellings for words such as “Saviour.” In addition, we kept where the author capitalized random words. This was a decision made by all group members and it was one that was very difficult. We struggled to find the line where our decisions were altering the texts significantly. As Pierazzo emphasizes Driscoll’s point in the article, Driscoll says, “we might conclude that one possible and tempting answer to the question ‘where to stop’ could be ‘nowhere’, as there are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded. Nevertheless such an answer opens the field to more theoretical and practical concerns” (pg. 466). The marking up of these transcriptions has enabled me to understand that though portions of the original document are present, they are still being altered. Our transcriptions of the Bethlehem memoirs have been changed to be better understood by the reader and in some ways that could affect the originality of the texts.

With the members of my group, we decided to tag “Jesus,” “Saviour,” and “Holy Ghost,” as people to remain consistent in our TEI model. Also, we thought that it was a good idea to change our abbreviated terms like “Br.” to the full word of “Brethren.” This process was most interesting to me in this project because it felt like I, personally, was bringing my transcription to life. Pierazzo explains this process of tagging in the best way possible by stating, “The output displays the transcribed text as closely as possible to the original document, but it is the scripts that store the knowledge (the scholarship) of how to produce such an edition. One might use a culinary metaphor here: the source contains the ingredients, the scripts contain the recipe, and the output represents the cooked dish” (pg. 473). I was identifying the key terms and encoding them at the same time. In the article written by Pierazzo, she explains how, “One of the reasons why the TEI model is particularly effective is because it enables the encoding and transcription of several alternatives for the same segment allowing, for example, the encoding of abbreviated forms along with the expanded ones, or of erroneous passages and their editorial corrections” (pg. 473). Overall, we hadn’t encountered any disputes about our markup decisions because we had collectively agreed to use similar tags and worked closely on our own individual transcriptions. Each document was different, except for the way we decided to format it.

 

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Blog #4

Blog #4

Over the past few weeks, our group has been focused on transcribing the Grundy memoir and we just finished tagging it up. These two steps are what Pierazzo refers to as the creation of the diplomatic edition: “The two products will possibly contain the same text, but while the first will be a private product, the latter will be a publicly published one”(464) – the first product being the marked up version 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.

 

The process of collaborating as an editorial board really made me understand how much goes into producing texts. Communication is essential when working as a part of a team. When we first began 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.