Week 5: Down the Rabbit Hole (of TEI)

It isn’t a surprise that in the process of selecting a text for the encoding challenge Angelique and I made a strong case to Natasha for selecting a section from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Not only is Alice a classic text, but its publishing history, content, and popular and scholarly fan base make it a relevant use-case for TEI encoding.

What struck us when considering Alice was that there didn’t appear to be a TEI encoded version already available. Mind you, our search wasn’t exhaustive, but we did poke around a bit. With no available examples, Alice seemed like a rich opportunity for trying our hand at some meaningful encoding.

I have previously looked at Alice’s publishing history, in particular, the movement from Carroll’s (or Charles Dodgson as he was known personally) original illustrated manuscript to what would later become the published version of Alice illustrated by John Tenniel. One idea we had for encoding Alice would be to encode the same passage from the manuscript and from the published text. Encoding these passages would bring up numerous questions, such as how to represent the unique characteristics of each text, which while similar, also diverge in many ways. In particular, we wondered how we could represent the relationships between the texts using TEI.

Alice also presents a challenge when it comes to representing its many kinds of content, such, as poems, songs, illustrations and sometimes text layout. One page in particular caught our attention:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, pg 37, taken from  https://archive.org/details/alicesadventur00carr

Getting the size and spacing right for this passage seems like the job of a seasoned typesetter (as I’m sure it was initially). Given that we are not seasoned XML or TEI encoders, we thought this passage might be a good place to get our toes wet – might being the operative word.

One final aspect that makes Alice an interesting selection for TEI encoding are the various audiences who appreciate the text.  Given the breadth of readers interested in Alice (children, adults, scholars from multiple fields), we would have to ask ourselves who would our encoded text be useful for and how would it be useful? Kirschenbaum addresses this same question in this week’s reading when he talks about the design of user interfaces in digital humanities projects. Specifically, he seems to ask, can you create a resource that is useful not just for scholars, but also for “humans” (aka those who simply want to be able to read and enjoy the text)? Though we aren’t designing the interface that will connect readers with our encoded text, we have to consider that the more tags we add, the more complex the interface will have to be to allow the reader to access the embedded metadata.

In the end, we decided not to go with Alice (since Natasha has never read it and we didn’t want to overwhelm her with our enthusiasm when she couldn’t feel the same). However, not  to worry! As Natasha and Anqelique have mentioned, we were able to find a text that we are all equally excited about – a textbook belonging to our favourite boy wizard. Now it’s time for the real TEI encoding magic to happen.