TEI Lab

When I initially read "Intro to Text Encoding" by Sarah Connell, Julia Flanders, and Syd Bauman and downloading Oxygen for Thursday’s class, I was not sure how to feel about our lab. I actually used to be a mechanical engineering major so part of me was attempting to guess how complicated and confusing the lab could be and the other part of me was recognizing familiar coding terminology such as elements and attributes. Although the reading broke down exactly how TEI works including metadata in headers, architecture of documents, linkages, named entities (people, places, or things) etc. However, I think I am a learner who definitely learns best by doing the activity so working in some basic TEI helped me to understand the chunks of TEI I saw within the text.

What I was extremely interested in when we were working in Oxygen was how naming entities are determined, because when we look back to Lauren Klein’s reading and her visualization map, it is easier to see how the naming in determined and how that can contribute to silenced voices within archives. Essentially, it is up to the user, or in this case me, to determine what things are named, and how they are named. We worked with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and I, let’s say attempted, to name England, but it was my decision at the coder to label England as a name and then further specify what type of name in this case a country.

This activity reminded me of the famous peanut butter and jelly instructions activity where engineers ae told to write instructions on how to make the sandwich, but the instructions will be interpreted literally. I say this because naming and assigning attributes felt like that activity, where one cannot not automatically assume that these attributes will assign themselves, but it is me who must determine them. I also kept asking myself question like “ok what is this word? A name. The name of whom? The author.” Then I realized that even asking myself questions like that is probably something that can inherently contribute bias as to how the piece is shown within an archive simply due to the TEI I create.