manuscripts of this type survive from the colonial era, it is especially important to create new opportunities for both their preservation and their dissemination.
The second segment concentrated on the art and theory of critical editing, with in-depth rereading of the primary sources from what Stuart Hall calls negotiated positioning.1 Emphasis was placed on readings by Peter Shillingburg, Leah Marcus, David Greetham, Leroy Searle, John Lennard, and Zachary Lesser. Segment three consisted of a study of basic paleography and transcription techniques appropriate for women’s writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spanish America. After a bit of practice, the project began. The classes transcribed unpublished portions of The Life Story of María de San José. We are grateful to the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, for the 1,200-page manuscript.
In the fourth and final segment of the courses, the class moved to the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, where Mary Alexander and Dr. Emma Wilson taught the students text encoding and how to make a digital edition. (See fig. 4.1.)
Figure 4.1. Manuscript page from Maria de San Jose Oaxaca Manuscript 87R.
ENCODING A DIGITAL EDITION
The Environment
The Alabama Digital Humanities Center provided tools needed to encode a digital edition. The Macs had oXygen, an extensible markup language (XML) editor, installed on them. Big screens displayed slides and oXygen’s screen. A whiteboard was used to record discussion points. This facility provided an ideal group learning environment.
The Team
The students were divided into groups of twos or threes. They would switch roles of encoder and proofreader. Mary Alexander led the instruction in using oXygen as an encoder and in the metadata principles governing TEI; Connie Janiga-Perkins led the literary research questions and conundrums presented by transcribing and encoding the text, specifically with regard to making the transition between the manuscript itself and a digital version; and Emma Annette Wilson mediated the discussions, asking questions about the links between the choices being made within the encoding, the transcription, and the original manuscript itself and extrapolating broader principles of digital scholarship at work within the scenario.
Teaching TEI
The TEI’s customized schema, TEI Lite, was the best fit for the project with its set of basic elements for encoding a digital edition, a strong community of members, and its tools to support the creation of digital editions. Students were instructed to open an oXygen TEI P5 Lite template that provided the root element, list of namespaces, TEI header, and body sections in a valid TEI document. After discussion on the purpose of the namespaces, we started immediately encoding the text body. TEI header work was scheduled for the last class.
The students were instructed to paste the transcription in between the opening and closing tags of the paragraph element. A lesson on the importance of opening and closing tags in a well-formed document included information about the XML, an independent language used to store and transport data, the foundation of TEI’s syntax. The line break element (<lb/>) was needed at the beginning of each prose line to mark a boundary point separating sections of text. Students were introduced to an XML syntax called milestones in TEI. oXygen’s abilities as an XML editor with its internal support for TEI was demonstrated as it automatically provided a closing tag before students could finish typing the complete tag.
The groups of students were assigned pages of the diary to encode. Elements were needed for diacritics, strikethroughs, and superscripts to indicate abbreviations in the manuscript. Students learned about the UTF-8 character set. When a character with a diacritic was not supported by this character set, it would need additional inquiry for identification. Beginning with this unidentified character, a list of characters with unresolved encodings was compiled for future reference. Meanwhile, the class progressed from simple encodings to complex nested elements and elements with attributes. These gave the students opportunities to learn correct syntax for sustaining a well-formed and valid document.
The class discussions centered on possible encodings. Some thought that an element should be used to emphasize strikethroughs with thick dark markings, to indicate text being emphatically crossed out. The discussion on bold strikethroughs segued into a discussion about the meaning of diplomatic edition, an encoded text that is a literal transcription of the original document, including its physical structure and its variations. In this way, the digital teaching approach illuminated traditional editorial debates, bringing them to life afresh for a modern student group.
Within the manuscript, marginalia included words in the left margin, Arabic number with an alpha character in the right margin, and a drawing of a cross in the center. All were encoded to represent the original text layout. The words in the left margin were encoded as a segment as it was decided earlier that the document did not have text divisions. The cross required a glyph element to contain the URL to the cross’s image. The students decided to use the glyph’s subelement, desc (description) in which they supplied the basic description, “Religious cross.” The glyph and desc elements served as an introduction to the larger TEI P5 standard, as they were beyond TEI Lite’s schema. The TEI community’s ROMA tool was introduced to produce a customized schema with the glyph element and its subelement for validation and documentation. With each additional element outside TEI Lite, the ROMA tool provided the needed documentation. This example of advanced encoding was crucial in allowing students hands-on experience of the possibilities opened up by TEI.
oXygen’s feature to transform the encoded text to a web page display served as an aid for proofreading and visualization of the digital edition’s layout. It was a favorite of one student based on her remarks and repeated use of it.
The TEI header elements are similar to a library catalog record with more elements. The header contained a source description element for describing the digital edition. For this element, the students thoughtfully crafted statements about their edition, and in this part of the class they had an opportunity to formalize some of the editorial principles that they had been discussing during their encoding sessions. The header include an annotated bibliography compiled by the students.
These encodings will be part of the iteration performed on the remaining raw text until it is completely transformed into a digital edition by future classes. The last class will perform final proofreading and edits.
OUTCOMES AND ONWARD
Team teaching this iterative graduate class is enabling students to engage in the creation of original research that will result in a substantive, lasting outcome once the digital edition is launched. Students were able to benefit from combined expertise in Hispanist studies and in digital techniques, and the sum of that experience generated a detailed knowledge both of their early colonial manuscript and its nuances and of the editorial dilemmas faced within a scholarly digital environment. The union of very traditional paleography and bibliography skills with cutting-edge digital techniques gives students a good foundation in both areas of their chosen field, preparing them for both onward research and, pragmatically, the job market.
Team teaching also made it possible for the students to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time, as their discussions were mediated by the voices and research specializations of all three faculty members leading the class sessions. This setup created a truly immersive environment for the students, one that precisely models a modern research collaboration in the humanities and also that embodies the dynamics of a professional conference in the field. These intellectual experiences provide valuable professionalization opportunities for students that go beyond tangible skills
