Links for Class #5

Reading

Flanders, Julia, Syd Bauman, and Sarah Connell. “Text Encoding.” In Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, 104–22. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.

Harlem Shadows

We probably won’t have time for this exercise, but for those of you asking yourselves the question of why one bothers with text encoding markup, this digital edition of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922) offers a potential answer.

• Chris Forster and Roopika Risam, Harlem Shadows: An Electronic Edition, http://harlemshadows.org.

Questions:

1. What is unique or different about this digital edition of Harlem Shadows as compared to any single scanned print edition that the editors link to on the home page (i.e. the Google Books or Archive.org copies)? Identify 2-3 characteristics of each.
2. Who do you think each edition is for? Who is their target audience? What type of reader?
3. In what ways can you “read” each edition? From start to finish? By flipping through looking for the interesting bits (what are the interesting bits?)?

Lab: Close Reading with the Text Encoding Initiative

For the remainder of the class period, we will work through this lab on text encoding: https://github.com/giannetti/TEI-Close-Reading.

Blog post no. 2

Write your second blog post of 250-500 words about what you learned in this lab on text encoding with TEI-XML. Consider this posts as an exercise in discovery and observation. You may want to record thoughts and take screen captures during the lab so you have some material to reflect on as you write your post. Avoid a simple recounting of the steps you followed, since everybody in the class knows the general outline, and move instead towards reflection and analysis.

Consider answering these questions:

• What is the aim of the particular method or approach demonstrated in the lab?
• What relationships, trends or patterns emerged?
• Did you find the process or the results compelling? Why or why not?
• What failed to go as you had expected? Why? Were you able to make creative use of a failure?
• How do your findings relate to the reading(s)? Do they verify, extend, or challenge the arguments of the reading(s)?

Your blog posts should include the following:

• An image or screen capture of some aspect of your work that serves as evidence.
• An explanation of what the image might serve to illuminate.

Use Markdown to author your post, if you are comfortable with that syntax. Given our time constraints, I will also accept .docx submissions through Canvas. If you go that route, please also upload your image as a separate .jpg or .png file. Keep in mind that your posts will be published at https://rutgersdh.github.io/humdata22/ so that we all can retrieve and read them on the course website. Together, blog posts account for 30% of your grade. You are encouraged to read each other’s posts.