I have experienced HTML only briefly in adding content to the Mason Family Account Book Digital project. I chose this module for my first optional week of work because when I encounter coding it confuses me and I hope to at least be able to understand enough of what I am looking at to know where to look to figure things out. XML and TEI are completely new to me.
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an important consortium that creates guidelines for encoding text. As Cummings’s article suggests, I too think it is important to have a paper trail of the changes in how this group and digital humanities perceive the challenges associated with text coding. It seems that many of the proposed solutions to the TEI myths could be applied to most misunderstandings. Since the TEI Guidelines are such a large corpus of information, many people only engage with small portions of it. This calls for long term teaching approaches through smaller, more digestible modules. This encompasses the more or better teaching materials that Cummings calls for. Also, as in many committee settings, more open communication needs to be embraced.[1]
The only crowdsourcing projects I am aware of are the only facilitated by the National Archives, for example, their efforts to transcribe Revolutionary War pension applications. I have never engaged with them, because well, I have enough of my own transcription work to work on, but they always catch my eye. I guess I would consider this type of recruiting “lightweight peer production,” that Causer and Wallace describe in their article. Now knowing the distinction between lightweight and heavyweight production, I wonder who they have going through these records and annotating them, or even if they do have people in these roles.[2]
Just because of the massive scope of the ODNB, I too had never thought of being able to study it as a corpus and record itself. I have thought about studying source creation at a much smaller scale, which did not require wrestling with text encoding. The two voices of historiography just complicate things more for me in a world of trying to understand scholarly arguments and where I fit in with them. As we have learned, digital humanities projects inherently contain arguments, and it makes complete sense about the data structure of such a large project to have a framework.[3] Also, I find Warren’s definition of digital humanities interesting: Information history, digital history, sociology of knowledge, media archaeology, history of archives, distant reading, and data visualization.[4]
Reading Causer with XML, man I’m going crossed eyed now. It is interesting that I can still follow what is there and the information that XML provides. The body of the article is fairly similar, minus the information about italics and the like, but the extra tag information about the articles metadata is cool to see the thought process of creating the file.
For the technical activity of coding a document I chose to encode a letter from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Along with the transcription, applying the proper HTML tags for superscript, underlines, paragraphs, and right justified text for the header, I see the amount of work that goes into putting text on the web.
[1] James Cummings, “A world of difference: Myths and misconceptions about the TEI,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy071.
[2] Tim Causer and Valerie Wallace, “Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham, Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.63744/g2e6wuytv8hd.
[3] Christopher N. Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB),” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (2018), 4, 31. https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028
[4] Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (2018), 2. https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028