Week 5: What didn't make the cut

Punch vol. 28, 1855

I have been racking my brain since our second lecture trying to find the perfect text that would be simultaneously challenging, interesting and enjoyable to encode using TEI. My first thought was that it has to be a rare book and it has to have some special quality about it. Of course that is when my memory decided to fail me and I couldn’t remember the names of any of the amazing objects we looked at in Book History last year. So thinking about illustrated print led me to think of using a page from Punch magazine. How great would that be? It combines text and image and would surely make for an interesting project. However, as we continued to learn and read about XML, it dawned on me that XML does not function like HTML so form, while still important, is not as crucial as content.

The Caroline Stokes Scrapbook,
1929-1933

Ok, so now what? I had just been looking through an exhibition catalogue from the AGO, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, which recalled its slightly more textual counterpart, the scrapbook. Scrapbook pages would certainly be a challenge based on the layout, and through the attempt to tag a page’s content based primarily on the context of the scrapbook and its owner. 

Grimm's Household Fairy Tales, 1891

I wanted something that would be appealing because of its images, marginalia, stains, what have you, but also something that would lend itself to the interpretation and analysis of its content. One day while I was doing research for another course, I got the sudden urge to read the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because, why not?) and decided that this had serious potential. The fairy tale as a genre, the imagery used in the narrative (both literally and figuratively), possible allusions, and the context of the collection would provide an ideal opportunity to explore the intricacies of XML encoding.

But when meeting with my group last week, as we discussed these options and others, we found ourselves feeling the same way: unsure, unsettled, and underwhelmed. Nothing was speaking to all three of us in a way that said, I am the absolute best choice, you won’t regret it! So we continued to brainstorm, discussing what would make each of these unique and challenging, and whether any of them provided enough content to support the assignment requirements. Something I think is important to keep in mind is that we, as the authors of the encoded document, get to invent our own tags. The great thing about TEI markup from what we’ve been learning so far is that we have the freedom to experiment and can tag our document as we see fit.

As we kept tossing around ideas, spending a long while thinking about using a few pages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we eventually came up with J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I think this will be a great object to work with based on the assignment instructions and because of the interesting way it plays with form, as Natasha has described in her post, (in addition to being a fictional textbook written in the style of an encyclopedia) and the intersection of the worldly and the magical. All in all it has been a challenge already, but I think we’ve finally settled on something that we can really enjoy and learn from!

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, J.K. Rowling, 2001