Week 5: Encoding Challenge Main Contender!

My group met late last week to decide on a text, and one of the main advantages (or problems depending on how you look at it!) is that we have an unlimited amount of possibilities for texts to choose from! An additional problem in choosing a text is that we all come from varying backgrounds/disciplines, therefore have different ideas on what the "ideal" text choice should be.

Although there are many contenders, one of the strongest is a text from the Harry Potter series, specifically from the book entitled Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a complementary text to the Harry Potter series, also written by J.K. Rowling). This text is high on the potential choices list due to all group members' general interest in the series and our desire to choose a creative and fun text. The text is very content-heavy, however it will prove to be a challenge because of the amount of footnotes, graphics, terms unique to the texts, and marginalia found within the pages we have chosen to encode - the assignment is called an encoding challenge for a reason and that's exactly what we wanted to do: challenge ourselves.

Below, you can find one of the five pages we will encode if we choose to move forward with this text. As you can see, there is a variety of context, marginalia, and a footnote present on this page.

Once we finalize the text we want to work with - we need to have a group discussion in which we collectively answer preliminary questions prior to moving forward with the code such as: Who is the audience? What aspects do we think are important to keep? What aspects do we think are not important enough and therefore need to remove? Or do we keep all aspects of the text intact in order to keep the integrity of the original? 

References

Rowling, J.K. (2001). Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. New York City: Scholastic.