Does anyone have specific examples of assignments that use TEI encoding to do a close reading of a text? The assignment, the results or general comments about how that could be structured, or if it did work with students, would be appreciated.
Can you do TEI with students, for close reading?
(5 posts) (5 voices)-
Alex Gil and I are working with Jerome McGann to do some TEI markup of a number of different versions of two poems by Emily Dickinson in an undergraduate poetry class this semester. We're writing about process as we go at http://tangouva.wordpress.com. We'll be posting more about this experience (particularly the TEI stuff) in coming weeks.
I wouldn't say that we used "TEI encoding to do a close reading"; our chief interest has been using TEI as a way to capture the complexities of a single poem's textual history and to introduce students to aspects of literary study which undergraduate education rarely covers. I do think, though, that close reading skills are indispensable when using TEI in this way and in using TEI in the classroom more generally.
For our purposes, comparing multiple witnesses to the manuscript and print history of a single poem, we are interested in how apparently minor changes (the presence or absence of line indentation; changes in punctuation and capitalization; changes in a poem's title) can affect what and how a poem means.
The result is a close reading focused not on semantic or linguistic aspects of the verse ("Why this word?" "What does this repetition suggest?") but on the various ways in which a "single poem" gets represented, how it enters print, and on its "bibliographical codes".
Because the question one faces when moving a poem from paper to TEI is always "What to mark up?" I think this exercise is particularly useful for highlighting the importance of such bibliographical codes. I would be interested, though, in hearing how other folks might use TEI to do a more traditional sort of close reading.
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
I've done this previously but as a method of teaching markup rather than close reading of a text, usually with a short and unproblematic poem in any case.
For example in our TEI Summer School in Oxford in 2010 we used In Flanders Fields for markup practice with exercises on metadata and transcription phenomenon. http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Oxford/2010-07-oxford/
I think the approach though, of having students do close reading by teaching them some basic markup and having them markup and discuss the textual problems in the text at hand. What you end up teaching them is more than close reading, it is editorial theory, perhaps philology, and a bit about metadata which feeds into their knowledge about proper referencing and citation.
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
Hi Hope,
Another option would be to have your students do close reading using XML, but not necessarily TEI. This gets them encoding much faster. They can still look at TEI for examples of what people tend to care about encoding, and juxtapose it with their own markup/editorial decisions. Some interesting discussions can flow from that.
I taught text encoding at a THATCamp a few weeks ago. Not much you can do in 75 minutes, but even in that short time workshop attendees had the chance to wrap their minds around the basic concepts and start asking quite sophisticated questions.
Other examples of using idiosyncratic XML for close reading include Virtual Humanities Lab (see the FAQ, and the Esposizioni and Cronica in particular) and RolandHT.
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @hopegreenberg's post:
Here is Kathryn Tomasek's Collaborative Research Assignment for a history class that has students encoding financial records as a basis for a larger paper: http://wheatoncollege.edu/digital-history-project/teaching/collaborative-research-assignment/
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
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