I think that Mia is cool. Part of her coolness
derives from the fact that Mia also has a pretty cool library in her apartment.
Looking through her library for a few options for the Encoding Challenge assignment, I was
struck by Ander Monson’s Letter to a
Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera
Found in Libraries. A book about marginalia!! Is there any sort of meta
analysis that can be drawn from encoding images of marginalia? The book is a
collection of library ephemera from the author’s friends’ shelves to a KGB
library and much in-between. Monson offers responses to the ephemera. I wonder
if there is something about the choices of marginalia and ephemera, and
Monson’s responses that can be “discovered” or highlighted through encoding his
text? Is there a sort of marginalia that appears more often than other sorts?
Is there anything about the placement of marginalia that can be extrapolated?
What do Monson’s interpretations say about marginalia?
 |
| Ander Monson. Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 27. |
 |
| Ander Monson. Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 23. |
The challenges with encoding this text are
related to the ways to represent the marginalia, which, in this case, are
collections of images of text with marginalia. As we explore the TEI
Guidelines, Mia and I must consider encoding an image, which is more or less an
image of a book or newspaper or article page with handwritten marginalia. And
then, we must choose how to represent marginalia in XML. The challenge will be
whether we can devise TEI to help answer the questions that I pose above? In my blog post last week concerning The Brevier Legislative Reports, I
noticed that this project used the <div type=“ ”> code (where a controlled term or tag
appears in the quotation marks) to identify various parliamentary procedures
and components (votes, committees, roll calls). This TEI code, 4.1.1
Un-numbered Divisions, is often used to represent in XML part or chapter of a
text. In my limited understanding of TEI so far, this would not be appropriate
for created a coding scheme for types of marginalia as <div> “contains a
subdivision of the front, body, or back of a text.”[1] But it does give us an appreciation of TEI’s
ability to categorize subdivision—I’m confident that we can find an analogous for
placement or type of marginalia or ephemera in books.
As I continue to work towards the Encoding
Challenge assignment, I’m still trying to figure out how to make TEI relevant
to this particular text. What are the
most important elements to highlight, as encoding can always be expanded on? I
also wonder if it possible to figure this out prior to attempting to encode, or
whether encoding leads more often to unexpected discoveries that were not (or could not be) hypothesized?
The scale of this encoding challenge may not allow me to answer that question,
but it is a question that I will remain cognizant of when I encounter digital
humanities projects in the future.
This is a super interesting choice for the encoding challenge. I think the challenge you're having with marginalia is the same type of issue I am having with a certain letter or bit of text that doesn't fit into a linear structure with the rest of the content. I've also thought about viewing it as an image since it's just as much of a visual feature as it is a textual one. I suppose there must be some way to convey that these features are additional layers of the content but now intrinsic to the work as a whole. Good luck!
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