Summary
For this week’s work I took the transcribed pages that I did last week and encoded it. Since I knew this would be a lot of work, I figured it would be easiest if I created a Google doc with all the tags I would need such as tags for italicizing, catchwords, indenting, and making marginal notes. This ended up being super helpful and making the work go by much faster. From there I went chapter by chapter and decided to break it down into paragraphs. Once I had a paragraph in Oxygen having my screen split, I compared it to the original which allowed me to easily see where I needed to put tags for Blackletter, where people’s names were, indenting, and other such tags. Working this way, I even noticed that I had forgotten to transcribe page 95 which I quickly did in about a half hour. From there I just continued to encode each paragraph as I did before. Additionally for the two figures I included a brief description for them. The only trouble I came across was figuring out page signatures which I will be asking about the next time we meet.
2/19 7:40pm-8:10pm (2.5 hr)
9:20pm-11:20pm
2/21 11:40am-2:10am (6.5hr)
4:40pm-6:40pm
9:40pm-12:00am
2/22 10:25am-10:40 (15min)
Total:9hr
Reflection
One of the things so far this semester I have done is taken the pages already encoded by the honor students of the digital humanities class that ran last semester and read through them. By looking through their documents I learned about a new tag for enlarging a letter by putting in the measurements. Looking through their work I had to learn to be open to new ways of encoding and tagging but also be understanding of why they may have put a specific tag where they did. Encoding is always changing so there are always new things to learn and just as they are learning, so am I.
The other part I have done has been focused on specific chapters that reference Shakespeare. Through this section I have learned to have built in checkpoints and to be more methodical. Since this week in my work I encoded what I had previously transcribed last week I’ve realized I had missed a whole entire page. This has made me realize that having some way to naturally check my own work is very helpful. Also having a sandbox version of TAPAS to check my work as I go through it is helpful because it allows me to know I am doing my encoding correctly. In regard to being more methodical as I said in my summary, I took all the tags I would need to use to encode and put them on a Google doc which made it so much easier to then encode the text. While it’s not always possible I think it’s important to recognize that there are ways to not work harder but to work better and therefore to help yourself.