Week 5: Encoding Ideas

My group has not definitively decided on an item for the encoding challenge but I'd like to share one candidate that I initially thought of when presented with the task of finding an interesting and challenging example. I first encountered this item last semester in the Rare Books and Manuscripts week on fine presses.

The Doves Press English Bible was issued in 5 volumes between 1903 and 1905. Its printers, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, had been associates of William Morris and let the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement influence their production choices - namely using quality paper and ink as well as paying attention to the character of the type. Here's an image of the first page of Genesis. Three things make this page interesting to me: The gradation of the text in size (and from upper to lower case), the choice to mark paragraphs with the paragraph symbol rather than space and indentations, and of course, the giant letter I.

http://link.library.utoronto.ca/exhibitions/greatandmanifold/cases6-7.cfm

The I is the reason I thought of this example but it's also the reason I'm not completely sure about this selection. This page seems to me to be a great example of Renear's discussion of hierarchies in last week's "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta) Theories of Textuality". This giant red letter throws off assumptions about natural, straightforward (platonic) hierarchies existing within the organization of text and in markup. In encoding this image, you'd have to make decisions about how to best represent the letter and that is definitely making a value-based decision. Like in the case of a decorated or illuminated initial, you'd have to ask questions about its importance to the page as a whole. Is it just a capital letter? If not, how do you represent it as being the focal point of the text? Is size or boldness or italics enough? And in this case, how to depict the frame-like aspect? Should it be repeated on every line somehow?

While this choice offers up so many questions and opportunities for original representational choices in XML, I am a little scared off by the practical side of actually encoding something like this. I suppose it goes to show that the material process and the content, in this case, are intertwined. It reminds me of Kirschenbaum's assertion in this week's reading that the content itself, the interface and the user's interaction with the material as a whole are difficult to separate into logical, discreet elements. It also shows the pluralistic notions that systems of neat textual hierarchies are not "an essential aspect of textual structure" (Renear, 121).

Works cited:

"Great and Manifold: A Celebration of the Bible in English" University of Toronto Libraries. Accessed February 6th 2016. http://link.library.utoronto.ca/exhibitions/greatandmanifold/cases6-7.cfm 

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "'So the Colors Cover the Wires': Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability." In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

Renear, Allen. "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality." Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, 107-26. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.