The process of marking up my transcription has bettered my understanding of Harriet Lee’s memoir because I feel I now comprehend the information that is embedded in our memoir. We already practiced distant reading, where I was able to get a broad overview of the text, so after marking it up and using TEI (very close reading), I was able to see the small details as well as the big picture. This combination of distant and close reading is called differential reading, which really helped me understand the text that I have been working with. I was able to come up with my own interpretation of the text, which I recognize would be different from any other individual because “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar (Pierazzo 465). The richness of the mark-up of text shows intellectual engagement. This is due to the fact that the extent of how an author marks up a text reflects how we interpreted what the author is saying. Each person has their own, unique interpretation and their own judgments and thoughts, which is demonstrated through the richness of textual mark-up. We worked to create a diplomatic edition, “a published version of a transcription
which reproduces as many of the characteristics of the original document as the medium permits or as the project requires” (Pierazzo 473).
Collaborating with Paige as an editorial board has changed my understanding of how edited texts are produce. In fact, my opinion on the entire editorial process has changed. There were so many little, but critical decisions we had to make when deciding what to mark-up. As discussed in “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, “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” (Pierazzo 465). I did not even consider this prior to this module. In order for us to have well-versed and consistent mark-ups, we were in constant conversation with one another. We would frequently ask each other questions on what specifically to tag something as, so that our work remained homogeneous and would provide us with a more accurate result in the end. We discussed the words/phrases that we were unsure about and compiled a list of our decisions on a Google Document, so we could refer back if the problem arose again. When knew discrepancies came up, we would decide how to tag something based off the precedent of our past decisions.
We decided not to tag “Saviour,” “Lord,” or “Holy Spirit” as a person because we decided that we would only tag concrete things and there is some skepticism revolving around religious figures. Likewise, we decided not to tag “heaven” as a place because it is not tangible. We also decided not to tag words like “sister,” “brother,” or “doctor” as they are too general and do not refer to a specific person. In certain contexts when it was not “she went to church” (a place), we treated it as an organization because it was referring to a group of people who share the same beliefs. By doing this, we tried to remain as objective as possible. ‘Thus we may conclude
that there is such a thing as objectivity of interpretation:
the vast majority of decisions
Prior to this module, I did not realize how tedious editing digital texts can be. I learned that it was very important for Paige and I to properly save our files and edit in the proper documents to ensure that we were both working in the most up-to-date version and did not lose any valuable changes.
Hailey Zimmerman is a sophomore finance major at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. She is from Darien, CT.