TEI Edition

Updates

To make it easier to see when I’ve made updates to the instructions, I will highlight the changes in yellow.

Rationale

Past courses of mine have already created digital editions of Duffy’s poetry. But if we are going to have confidence in our research, it’s critical that we make sure we have accurate versions of all of her poems.  While we could simply compare a digital copy of the poem to the one on the page, maintaining the attention necessary to catch errors is difficult if you’re just glancing back and forth. We need to do something more to keep ourselves aware of the fine details of the text. To this end, we will each be preparing a digital edition of one of her books of poetry.

In addition to providing a better environment for careful attention, a marked-up edition provides us the chance to enrich the text. These enrichments can take the form of adding themes to the metadata, tagging all place and/or person names, or identifying rhyme schemes in the different poems, as infrequent as they may be. If we work consistently across all five volumes of the poetry in this process, we will be query our markup to highlight similarities and differences between The World’s Wife and the books that precede it.

Nitty Gritty

Each of us will create a digital edition of one of Duffy’s first five volumes using XML and the TEI guidelines.

Standing Female Nude Brian Croxall
Selling Manhattan McKinsey Koch
The Other Country Chris Dichmann
Mean Time Maddie Calder
The World’s Wife Lorin Groesbeck

Your edition of Duffy will be due no later than Wednesday, 14 March 2018 Wednesday, 21 March Saturday, 24 March by 5pm. Your reflection papers are due on Monday, 26 March by the beginning of class.

Get Oxygen

Download Oxygen XML Editor and sign up for a free, 30-day trial. You will receive a license key via email and you will need to use it with your individual copy.

Get the poems

The text of each of Duffy’s volumes is available either on this shared Google Doc or in our Duffy repository on GitHub. The poems are identical in either location, so choose the one that seems easiest for you to work with.

Create  the poem file

Open the poem template from the repo in Oxygen and copy all of its text (Ctrl/Cmd-A, then Ctrl/Cmd-C). Then open a new document in Oxygen and paste the template (Ctrl/Cmd-V) into it. Do NOT start editing the template itself.

Name the file as follows: [two-digit number of poem]-[title of poem, underscored if multiple words]-[abbreviation of book].xml, using all lowercase. For example, “Girl Talking” and “Comprehensive” which are the first and second poems in Standing Female Nude would have the following filenames: 01-girl_talking-sfn.xml and 02-comprehensive-sfn.xml, respectively.

Save the file in the appropriate folder in your local copy of the GitHub repo.

Check the poem

Before marking up the poem, check carefully to see whether the poem has been transcribed faithfully from the text. Please pay special attention to the following:

  • Punctuation, especially at the end of lines
  • Spelling, being aware that British and American English differ and that the former is likely correct but not necessarily
  • Italics, making sure you have used the following markup: <hi rend="italics">

Mark-up the poem

Mark-up the poem as follows. Be sure to refer to our “Duffy Encoding Editorial Decisions” document.

teiHeader

  • <filedesc>
    • <titleStmt>
      • <title>: the poem’s title
      • <persName> within <respStmt>: your name
    • <publicationStmt>
      • <date>: the date you are encoding the poem
    • <sourceDesc>
      • <bibl> within <sourceDesc>: the original information about the poem you’re encoding
  • <revisionDesc>
    • <change>: record the date as the value for “when” using YYYY-MM-DD format and add your name / initials as the value for “who.” Then replace the “?” with a description of what you did. Most of the time, “initial markup” is a good description.
  • profileDesc
    • We will place the metadata for theme, gender, place, children, and narration in the textClass –> keywords –> term.
    • For each term, you will include a type:
      • Theme. Using the list from our Duffy Encoding Decisions document, include as many themes as seem reasonable. Each theme gets its own term tag. Be open to themes that are not yet on the list and bring them to the class.
      • Gender.  Identify whether the poem contains characters who are male or female and then identify whether the characters are major or minor. Write the characters types as follows: “major female character,” “major male character,” “minor female character,” or “minor male character.” Each of these gets its own term tag. If there are no characters with identifiable genders, simply write “unknown.”
      • Place. A poem should be marked qua place on one or more of three binaries: rural or urban; public or private; inside or outside. A poem can be both of the binary’s options at the same time (e.g., public and private). Finally, if you can determine which country or even continent a poem is set, include that (e.g., Britain, Africa). Each of these gets its own term tag.
      • Children. Depending on whether there are children in the poem or not, simply write “Yes” or “No,” respectively.
      • Narration. Record the point of view of the poem. The most common choices will be “first person” or “third person.” Occasionally, poems use the second person, like “I Remember Me” in SFN. There should only be one point of view for a poem. But you will create a second narration term to indicate whether or not there is a “you” addressed in the poem. Simply write “you” or “no you.”

      Body

      • Structure
        • <head>: the poem’s title
        • Wrap the entire poem in a <lg type="poem" n="X">. Change the X to the number of the poem in the volume that you’re working on.
          • For the type of poem, you have three choices.
            • sonnet. Use this type if the poem has exactly 14 lines, even if it doesn’t use the standard sonnet rhyme scheme.
            • dramaticMonologue. Good examples include “Head of English” or “You, Jane.” Use this type if all of the following are true:
              • There is one speaker in the poem who is not the poet
              • The person addresses one or more people and we know about what they say or do based only on the speaker’s words
              • The speaker’s words reveal something about the speaker
            • poem. Use this for all poems that do not fit either “sonnet” or “dramatic monologue.”
          • If the poem has an overall rhyming pattern, like a sonnet would, include the rhyme scheme in the opening <lg>, e.g., <lg type="poem" rhyme="ababcdcdefefgg">.
        • Wrap each stanza in a <lg type="stanza" n="X"> tag. Change the X to the number of the stanza.
        • Wrap each line in a <l> tag and number the lines, e.g., <l n="1">
        • If a poem has multiple parts, like “Poem in Oils” in SFN or “The Devil’s Wife” in TWW, encode it as a composite poem.
      • Semantics
        • Tag all person names using <persName>. If the person is a real person, put in a VIAF reference using ref=""
        • Tag all named places using <placeName>. If the place corresponds to somewhere in the real world, put in a GeoNames reference using ref="", e.g., <placeName ref="http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_40.714_-74.006.html">
        • Tag all body words using <seg type="bodyPart">
        • Tag rhymes, both end and internal with <rhyme> and use the label attribute to indicate the rhyme scheme, e.g. <rhyme label="a">

      Push the poem

      After you’ve finished your work on the poem, make sure you push the changes you have made to the repo using the GitHub Desktop client. You might want to create a different commit for each poem as you work.

      Reflect on the poems

      After you have completed your edition, you will write a two- to three-page reflection on the assignment. Some questions to consider in your reflection are:

      • What did I learn about digital humanities from this assignment?
      • What did I learn about Duffy’s poetry from this assignment?
      • What did I learn about research from this assignment?
      • What would I change about this assignment to make it more relevant, informative, enjoyable, challenging, or interesting?

      Grading

      This assignment is worth 150 points. I will randomly select five of the poems that you marked up. Each poem will be worth up to 25 points distributed as follows:

      • 5 points: I will check the poem to see if it is well-formed (per XML standards) and if it validates (against the TEI schema).
      • 5 points: I will check the poem’s text against the original text to make sure it is all correct.
      • 5 points: I will check to see if your <TEI Header> contains all the required information, including the user-determined metadata, such as theme, poem form, “I & you”- vs third-person narration, and anything else we determine as a class. 5 points
      • 10 points: I will check the <text> to see if you have correctly tagged person names, place names, body words, as well as anything else we determine as a class.

      The remaining 25 points for the assignment will be awarded for timeliness and in connection with the reflection paper.

      Credits

      I designed this assignment in 2018 after discussions with Elli Mylonas, digital humanities librarian, TEI aficionado, and colleague extraordinaire. Elli created the poem template and will—no doubt—continue to answer a great many questions as we go along.