Week 4: British Women Romantic Poets Project

Since starting this course, I have become increasingly more interested in the digitization of older works - works include books, poems, manuscripts, and more. When faced with this week's blog task, I was pretty enthusiastic, since I have very limited experience with XML, including breaking it down into a readable format. 

I quickly found a topic and project that I found interesting: the British Women Romantic Poets Project. According to their website, their goal was to create an online scholarly archive consisting of poetry by Irish and British women during the Romantic period in English literary history. This project utilizes TEI in order to tag their texts. Now, they have made changes to standardize their procedures to allow their TEI headers to transform into MARC headings. All of this is done in the name of "interoperability".

Under the description of the project, it is identified that they follow the encoding practices based on the Victorian Women Writers' Project at Indiana. If the project had to implement any changes in the encoding practices, they made it clear in their Encoding Guidelines Manual. 

The project has been on-going for quite some time, so the style of encoding changed. Prior to 2007, texts were encodded in Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML). After that point, all texts were encoded using Extensible Markup Language (XML). And what a treat! This project allows visitors to see both the encoding as well as the HTML version of the text!

Frankland, Sarah.
Leaves of poesy, original and selected. 1838.
XML

For someone with virtually no experience with encoding, being able to do a split screen between the XML and HTML versions of the same work helped me to better understand what is being encoded. It's all fine and well to read about the theories, and see the lists of tags, but to physically see the influence these tags have on the work themselves is very helpful. I'm hoping that with continued exposure (and perhaps even some hands-on experience) will allow me to understand not only items in the text that require encoding, but to grasp what XML if for.

Frankland, Sarah.
Leaves of poesy, original and selected. 1838.
HTML

I will definitely be keeping these examples in my back pocket as we head into the Encoding Challenge, and draw up to our final project.

Taken from the home page of
The British Women Romantic Poets Project

Links:

Check out the British Women Romantic Poets Project! 

TEI: Projects: I found this interesting example of the project through the TEI: Projects page. Maybe you will find something interesting there, too!

Week 3: The 70mm film experience

Building from Mia’s blog contribution this week, I can’t help but to think about my recent screening of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, The Hateful Eight. What is interesting, and unusual, about the screening was its film projection (as opposed to digital projection) and the fact that Tarantino filmed it in 70mm film. Not only was film projection an experience that I haven’t encountered in, at least seven or eight years, but 70mm format has been declining in use since the mid-century and rarely used since the 1990s. From my understanding (of my reading of various reviews and news articles), the advantage of 70mm is its wide format—in other words, its ability to capture wide shots and to include a lot of landscape in a frame.

The blog question for this week concerns what insights can be garnered from the process of digitalization (what is different or lost from the analog representation), which is a question similarly inflicted my thoughts throughout watching The Hateful Eight. I use the word inflicted because throughout the approximately three-hour film, form was explicitly on my mind. Some thoughts included, 1) “that wide-angle shot captures so much of the mountainous landscape”; a thought surely influenced by reviews and news articles that I read, 2) “an imperfection from the film projection!” 3) “an intermission! How golden age Hollywood.” Many these feelings were obviously the desired effect of Tarantino, who is a quick outspoken of this dislike for digital cameras. Last week’s reading from Sperberg-McQueen makes an interesting about how the form of the representation (of a text, film, etc.): “But tools always shape the hand that wields them; technology always shapes the mind that use it (p. 34, my emphasis). My consumption of a film reel projection of a movie made on 70mm film is inflicted by the format. Would I have enjoyed it as much from a digital projection? Is asking how I would have enjoyed/experienced the same script filmed on the standard 35mm even worth asking, given how a format always mediates my experience? The blog post has helped me work through why it is not productive to examine analog versus digital debates in binary good versus bad discourse. A representation, in various forms, is much more complex and can evoke different meanings that ultimately require further critical engagement. Indeed, especially in our consumption of art or artistic endeavours, the artist’s use of a given medium offers a wide range of opportunities to explore how forms affects those who consume it.

References

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46.

Week 3: Digital World

The first thing you have to know is that I work part-time at an independently-owned balloon and party store in Etobicoke. I am lucky as all heck that I a) have a job and b) have a job I like with pretty awesome people to work with.

Anyway. The store changed owners in May 2015, just about when I was hired, and we have very quickly moved from old-style punch-in cash registers to bar code-scanning Apple desktop computers. This has gone down better with some staff than others. And in the last month, we switched from paper to an online scheduling system at wheniwork.com.

Prior to the scheduling app, making any changes to the existing schedule required a conversation:

"Hey, do you think you could take my shift on Tuesday? I can switch with you for Wednesday if you want."

"Sure. I'd rather have the Wednesday off, anyway."

or

"I can't, but talk to Jonah because I think he wanted some extra shifts this week."

It was peachy. Of course there were always last-minute scrambles and the occasional confusion, but for the most part the paper schedule went very smoothly. Now, though, if I want to switch a shift I click a button on the computer. wheniwork is good because it keeps track of everything. But I'm going to miss having those conversations.

The online schedule has fundamentally changed what a schedule is. It's gone from being a public event to a private one simply because there is no longer a stapled Excel printout on the counter behind our new, shiny cash registers. Additionally, some staff are highly computer literate, others less so. I have yet to hear what the less tech-addicted staff have to say about the scheduler, but if it's any indication, only one out of ten employees have uploaded a profile picture to wheniwork.com. I am not that person.

Week 3: The lost art of watching a movie

In high school I worked at the movie theatre in my small hometown. The theatre is housed in a large stone building, one of the originals lining the main street, and had a past as both an underwear factory and a slaughterhouse. As a movie theatre, it meets the needs of my small town, with a single screen, old-fashioned plush red seats, and showings of two or three different movies per day. The walls of the screening room are of the same exposed stone as the outside, and on the back wall, opposite the screen, there is a large black and white painting by a favourite local artist, that rivals the screen in size and depicts a theatre audience howling with laughter, mouths stretched comically wide. I am describing all of these quaint, somewhat dated details of the theatre because the most important piece of technology, the projector, was of the same nature until my last year working at the theatre. In my final summer they made the change from a film projector to a digital one, and the biggest difference I noticed at the time was a change in the process of screening a movie, and even, to an extent, the beginning of a lost art.

Before getting the new projector, the three employees who were allowed to work in the booth were projectionists; it was an actual skill you needed to have to apply to the job, knowledge you needed to possess of how to prepare, screen, and dissemble a film and the projector. It wasn’t as simple as hitting “play,” because I should note as well that the theatre operated with the changeover system. A movie is usually too long to be contained on a single reel of film, and so most of the movies came to us on two separate reels, to be screened on two separate projectors in the booth. The projectionist looks for their cue on the film, usually a few small dots in the upper corner of a frame, and has to change the projection over from one machine to the other at the exact right moment – when done properly, the audience will not even notice a break or pause in the action of the movie. As I said, I would argue that this whole process is an actual skill, and one that has largely been lost to movie theatres since the rise of digital projection as far as I know.

In addition to my own experience with the change in process, this blog post has made me reflect on the experience of the projectionists themselves. They didn’t seem overly concerned with the projector machine; rather they lamented for months the difference in the digital movie versus the one on film. In hindsight, I would compare it to the ongoing argument for tree books over eBooks, in which people talk about how much they enjoy the materiality of the former, the weight in their hands, the quality and feel of different papers for the pages, the beauty of an old binding, the smell, and all of the ways that these physical characteristics influence their experience of reading in a way that digital does not. The projectionists had the very same arguments – screening a film wasn’t the same anymore, it wasn’t even film! The alleged smell of it in the projection booth was gone, on screen the movies lacked depth of colour and a certain “grain” to the image, it looked flat and too bright, the digital format was “flimsy” compared to a heavy reel of film in its round suitcase-like container. As a teenager who sold candy and tickets and then got to watch the movies from the back of the theatre, I can honestly say that I don’t remember noticing a difference, but for the projectionists, the entire experience of screening and watching a movie had changed.

Week 3: On representation and the dichotomy between scholarly and pleasure reading

While working on an essay about Virginia Woolf’s The Waves last year I came across a digital archive dedicated to another of Woolf’s famous works, To the Lighthouse. Despite the large collection of books by and about Virginia Woolf you’ll find in my apartment, for some reason I have never been able to get father than 30 pages in to To the Lighthouse (a fact I usually keep a secret). Still, the Woolf Online archive (which can be accessed at: www.woolfonline.com) caught my attention and I spent much too long exploring it and thinking about To the Lighthouse when I should have been thinking about The Waves.

One thing that struck me as I explored the archive was that it defines its audience. Woolf Online is meant for Woolf scholars, and not for those looking to enjoy a literary experience.

The content and purpose of the digital archive is described as follows:

“The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she worked on To the Lighthouse, and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, all of which inform the setting and characters of the novel.” 

Kind of like the book wheel we looked at in class, this archive has a highly defined use case. Thinking about this in relation to our class I asked myself, how does presenting these texts and supporting material in the context of scholarship and not the context of reading for pleasure affect both how the materials are represented and how users then interpret these materials?

Looking specifically at the US first edition of To the Lighthouse, the manner in which the text has been digitized and the access routes provided to the reader clearly indicate that the text is for study, not for pleasure reading.

One of the first signs that this representation of To the Lighthouse is designed for scholarly use is that the interface privileges the page as a distinct unit of study. Each page is given its own unique name identifier and description and then is provided as both an image and as a text transcription. Navigating between a page image and a page transcription proves to be an easier task than trying to navigate forward or backwards in the text like you might do when reading the book to take in the story. Indeed, even when looking at a page image, the full page is never in view (unless you have a much larger screen than myself, or you use your browser’s zoom out function), and despite the page already being enlarged, the interface also provides a magnifying function which brings your attention to small details such as typography, paper texture and any small defect on the page. In this way the interface privileges the study of page construction, which, though important, may not be the main focus of those reading the text from start to finish.

Another interesting representational choice is the ability to “layer” a page transcription over a page image (see image below). This layering effect serves to separate the “text” of the page from the page itself by making them two distinct units.  For me, the layering effect also draws attention to the shape of the words on the page and the typography (seeing as the transcription is always in the same basic san serif font). On a more (or maybe less) obvious note, this representational feature also makes the page extremely hard to read, drawing the user’s focus again to the details of the page instead of the story as a whole.

 

Woolf Online screenshot - showing transcript layering over page image and magnifying feature

In our reading this week I think Sperberg-McQueen captured the essence of how these kinds of scholarly textual representations can affect the actions and interpretations of the user’s that access them:

 “As scholars work more intimately with computers, the electronic texts they use ought to help them in their work, making easy the kinds of work scholars want to do with them. But tools always shape the hand that wields them; technology always shapes the minds that use it” (pg. 34).

Does this site allow scholars to do the kinds of work they are interested in doing with To the Lighthouse? It certainly provides a wealth of materials for scholars to look at and contextualize the production, dissemination and reception of the text. However, I think it is the way these materials are represented, and the ways in which the user can interact with them that Sperberg-McQueen is highlighting. And so, though the textual representation of materials related to To the Lighthouse (specifically the first US edition that I looked at in depth) allow the user to investigate the details of the text at a more granular level which is certainly useful to scholars, they also make it more difficult to view the text at a distance, and consider the text as whole. I wonder then, is there a way to represent a text online that allows the user to approach the text for either scholarship OR pleasure? Surely each kind of reading can inform the other.

References:

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927. Woolf Online. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie, Nick Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, and George K. Thiruvathukal. Web. 27 January 2016. <http://www.woolfonline.com>.

Trying to Capture a Live Experience

When I was in undergrad, I was part of a Gilbert and Sullivan society, because I am super cool.

 In this scene from Iolanthe, the Lord Chancellor has just discovered that his fairy wife does not have to be banished from the land of all the fairies due to a legal loophole. Viz. this author, far right, looking super pleased that she can now marry the Peer of the House of Lords of her choice because he has magically been turned into a fairy himself for reasons of PLOT and EMPIRE.

Image: CanalSavoir, http://www.canalsavoir.tv/emission/iolanthe



Our plays were put on every year over a two week run,  and, like all live theater, they were completely different each night. That's the beauty of theater; it is never the same show. Live theater is dependent on the audience, the mood and surrounding life story of each actor, current events, acoustics, and visual perspective. It is truly impossible to recreate theater as it was experienced because you cannot replicate all of these features. This is a reason, why, for example, Broadway revivals that do not take risks are often unsuccessful. The 2006 revival of Les Misérables was considered sluggish and slow, in part because it came too closely after a previous revival--it lacks the excitement and je ne sais quoi of the original, without creating any unique stage magic of its own.

The question of what happens with a play when it is recorded (digitally or otherwise) contends with many similar issues. With this particular play, we were recorded and somehow a Québec television company got a hold of the recording and started broadcasting it on late night public access television. Suddenly, people at work would come up to me and knowingly leer, "I saw you on late night TV last night...nice dancing!" (n.b. I am very dancing-challenged) I knew I had to go check it out myself, and was properly horrified by the fact that the sound balance was off, the colours were shaky (you can see in the picture above that the document being held at the center has odd stripes of yellow running through it) and in general it felt flat and lifeless.

Now, it is entirely possible that we presented a bad play. I have had people tell me it was very good, but these people are also close friends. I am of the opinion, however, that the problem is simply that there is no way to accurately record the feeling of a live performance in a digital medium. There may never be a way to record that feeling--to use another Beatles example, as exciting as it is to be able to have a live recording of the "Twist and Shout" performance where John Lennon tells the Queen to rattle her jewelry, we can't experience the feeling of seeing something so irreverent in person. We are desensitized by repetition and by the one-dimensionality of remediation.

The frustrating thing about this is that this digital copy of the play is the one that will be preserved, go into the university archives, and then be the only record that we performed it at all. Because it is ripped from its context, we don't get the full picture. Its transmission is limited, in my opinion.

In no way am I suggesting that the only successful digital texts are those that are "born digital". However, I would caution people attempting to create a digital adaptation of something out of context. You cannot simply record a live theatrical performance and then expect it to stand for itself: some form of renegotiation with the new digital medium is necessary to make it seem fresh and new, as it stood at its first performance in the theater.

Week 3: "You get the idea..."

Early on in his article, Sperberg-McQueen says "The representation of a text within a computer inevitably expresses an opinion about what is important in that text. It is thus a theory of that one text." (p.34) I find this really interesting when thinking about the idea of digital representation because often we are so quick to equate digitization with duplication. I have been doing a project at work recently where I have been tasked to dig through our special collections to find one image that adequately represents each collection. In the same way that multiple items can interchangeably stand in to represent one collection, multiple representational choices concerning one item can act as various theories about what that one item is. Choices in digitization sometimes seem to be guided by "Will they get the idea?" rather than "What are all the possible facets through which I can represent this item as a whole?".

In my digitization work at the Kelly Library, I have definitely found myself just trying to emphasize one takeaway impression or meaning or, as Sperberg-McQueen might say, theory. For example, I scan a portrait in a collection of 19th century French drama. I am not so focused on capturing the texture of the paper, the type of illustration (people don't need to know whether it's a wood engraving or a lithograph, right?!), or even the names of the actors that are mentioned. I'm more concerned with making sure people see the title of the play, the costumes in the illustration, the general old-timey-ness of it. In this case, the era and the aesthetic make up the representation. Maybe they even make up the essence, if you're a Platonist and you are into the essential thingness of things.

I am looking through NYPL's Digital Collections and observing the representational choices made there. In the poster section, I noticed that many individual images seem to be parts of a larger poster. I've noticed lots of cropped frames that show an edge of a separate image or a bit of text. Whoever was producing these images was making value-based decisions, like I have, about what is important and how the viewer will process the materials (one image at a time).

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-b093-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

I picked the above image as an example because you can clearly see some of the representational choices made. Below the holly ornament is the corner of a separate frame, perhaps related to this Boston Comedy Company poster. Even if it advertises a different play, it is printed as a set - maybe the viewer is meant to see the entire season's program at once? Additionally, the text in the lower right corner remained blurry even when I used the website's zoom tool, which makes it seem as though the person scanning wasn't worried about any added context there. Much like my own example, this digital representation is telling us: "Look at this specific play! The costumes! Look at the old-timeyness!"

I think that most of us know that digitization doesn't capture all aspects of the original but I liked Sperberg-McQueen's language choices of theories and opinions to show that the act of digitizing is not necessarily a neutral process.

Works cited:
Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46. 

Week 3: Still (Representing) Alice

Alice in Wonderland,
Tenniel illustration

For Professor Galey’s project last term in Analytical and Historical Bibliography, I had the opportunity to examine examples of Alice over the last one-hundred and fifty years. After examining dozens of examples, and flipping through articles and books breaking down the story of Alice, something became abundantly clear to me: the illustrations continue to change in interesting ways. From Tenniel’s early illustrations to modern interpretations, people were always reimagining Alice. What’s the first image that pops into your mind when you think of Alice? The cute blonde girl with the blue dress and white apron? Would it surprise you to know that she wasn’t always imagined in that way?

Alice for the iPad

An application is available for free download on iTunes called “Alice for the iPad” which presents the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on a digital platform. The most interesting decision to me in this digitized version was the choice to animate some of the illustrations. While there are static black-and-white Tenniel images throughout the story, the chapter pages and some additional pages have coloured illustrations that move. The reader can interact with the illustration, making heads move or items float around. Tilting the iPad around allows the user to interact with the story in their own way, whether it’s making Alice rock the pig faster, or scatting rose petals across the page.

The animation of these illustrations is meant to physically engage the reader in a different way, or entice those that would not have read the story to continue. The story can become more of an interactive experience, in a different way than a paper copy. Personally, I thought it was a very interesting choice to use early examples of the illustrations in a contemporary, digital version. Is it for nostalgia sake, using the older images for a more “true” representation of the original work, distancing us from Disney’s Alice? If that is the intention, then why consciously decide to alter it by allowing moving images? To me, the iPad application could speak to the power of the illustrations to draw you into the story. Unlike many contemporary picture books, Tenniel’s illustrations aren’t on every page of the story. But when they occur, they bring you one step closer into Wonderland.

Maybe the representation of the book is meant to show how a story written one-hundred and fifty years ago is still relevant. The digital pages are darkened with blackened edges, and the illustrations are fitting. Maybe not all good things are lost in a world that actively digitizes its past.  

Alice in Wonderland,
Tenniel illustration

 Sources:

Alice in Wonderland. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Accessed January 28, 2016. http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/pictures/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/

Links:

Check out Alice for the iPad here:  https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/alice-for-the-ipad/id354537426?mt=8

Week 3: What Context?

From the Globe and Mail's Historical
Archive: ProQuest

In thinking about this week's blogging question, I was immediately drawn to thinking about newspapers, since I have spend quite a bit of time volunteering on newspaper digitizations projects. When these pieces are digitized, they are usually digitized as entire pages, which can be scrolled through online, in order; however, individual articles are almost always extracted and displayed solo. What is most interesting to me is that, in that in most cases I have come across, when a searcher clicks on an article what is displayed first is this out-of-context piece (right)- the person then has to click on a 'view full page' link in order to display the page as a whole (below). In most cases, no one will do this - it's an extra step, and makes the article you were searching for smaller and harder to read.

From the Globe and Mail's Historical 
Archive: ProQuest

I feel as though this is an extremely significant representational choice - much more significant than the choice made to archive in colour vs. black and white - that seems to be going largely unnoticed. As newspapers are often arranged in sections by topic, looking at only a single article, and ignoring it's context, can actually lead the reader to interpret the article differently than they would have if it was read as part of a larger page. It could equally be argued that a person looking only at a single page would also miss the additional context (or even... experience?) that is provided by leafing through the paper as a whole (while most online repositories provide this browse function.... why would you? Once again, it's another extra step!)

On the flip side, looking at a single article might allow the reader to see things that would otherwise have been missed, if there was static hanging around on the outside of the piece. I guess in the final analysis, then, the choice to provide the out-of-context, enlarged article as the first destination is very much a debatable one, with no clear right or wrong. Myself, however, I always click on the full-page view - although I think this is likely more due to wanting the 'feeling' of reading a newspaper than the context provided by the rest of the page.


ProQuest Historical Papers: the Globe & Mail (1936-present): http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/hnpglobeandmail/publication/publications_1396354?accountid=14369

The Associated Press."Violence spreading in Iran as UN considers sanctions." The Globe & Mail. Dec. 29, 1979. Online edition. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/hnpglobeandmail/docview/1239290591/fulltextPDF/C99E34468914AC5PQ/5?accountid=14369

Week 3: An Ode to the Un-Digititzed

 

In the first week of lectures, Prof. Galey said that the course is not meant to persuade any one on whether digitized objects are better than the non-digitized version (and vice versa), and the course is actually a focus on choices and issues that one has to make when it comes to transferring a text (or image, etc.) to a digitized form. That being said, when it comes to images - I am a strong believer that the object being photographed is always better in real life (or IRL as people on the Internet say) as many of the aspects of the physical form are taken for granted and can often not be captured within the constraints of an image.

A classic example of this is vacation pictures: having seen the Taj Mahal IRL several times, not once have I been able to catch its actual beauty through a picture (the digital representation of it). Since I can't capture its essence through a picture, whenever I show someone the pictures I have taken, I always preface it with "It looks so much better in person!" Of course due to modern day technologies, I have the ability to edit a photograph by adjusting aspects of it such as brightness, saturation, angles, size, etc. to make it seem more visually appealing (or how one would think it would look more appealing). However once I do that, it is then a representation of how I think one would find the picture more appealing and/or what I think the Taj Mahal looks - not what it actually looks like.

What is taken for granted is the ambiance of standing around such a marvelous wonder, the perfect temperature during the evenings, talking a walk around the physical structure to see the many angles of the structure, being able to touch the cold marble on a warm day, the smell of the many marigolds planted around, and learning about the history of it from locals - these are aspects that just cannot be translated into a picture no matter how far technology advances. It also comes down to what choices a person personally makes. For example, on the left hand side is an image of the Taj Mahal I found on Pinterest. This is a beautiful image of the structure, however it is very obvious that it has been heavily edited to appear this way; although the structure and its surroundings still appear beautiful, it is missing to account for several of the aspects I had previously mentioned (like smell, touch, etc.)

Popular social media platform, Instagram, demonstrates this all the time. There are many pictures on the platform of people's vacations where they have made the colour of water more blue, the light of the sun more warm, or sharpened the angles of a tree, thus changing the image completely as they believe their edited version is more appealing. However, no matter how visually appealing a photograph is, there is just something about being there physically IRL to experience and witness the moment for yourself - one that no photograph can accurately capture...but you never know maybe one day with the advances in technology, it can be possible?


Street, Kenneth. (n.d.) Taj Mahal [Pinterest post]. Retrieved on Jan 26, 2016 from https://www.pinterest.com
 /pin/AQMs9YMMaMOEeVG5zgGFd47K-Wwp7hZEKHHERPAG7D1w2OkuaAmdJOs/

The Waste Land and TEI

In expectation of our class on TEI tomorrow I thought I would share a project I was part of during my undergrad course The Digital Text taught by Professor Adam Hammond. As a class we used TEI to encode T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In part we did this by tagging literary features such as repetition, outside quotations and echoes. Another way we worked to interpret and enrich the text through TEI was by establishing different speakers (or what we labeled "voices") within the poem and where each voice could be heard. Our final product was an online version of the text where the reader can highlight the various textual features and voices. 

Given our blogging question this week I thought this project was a good example of how digitization and textual encoding can be used to both interpret and add value to a text. It may also be a case where encoding is used to privilege some textual features over others. 

You can access and learn more about the project here: http://hedothepolice.org/ 
You can find our encoded version of The Waste Land  by hovering over the heading "WHAT THE CLASS SAID" and selecting "Read The Waste Land  as Divided by the Class"