It’s 22:00 (military, airport and Halifax time) on day three of week two, and I haven’t even begun one blog. Goodness, the rest of these TEMiC people are on the ball. Probably helps that they’re well balanced: today we talked about theoretical concepts and their corresponding examples, and were also provided with a generous offerings of clear and technical tips to put us at an advantage when we first embark on digital projects of our own. Additonally, we were encouraged to think about future-proofing our work not only for scholars and readers to come, but in terms of our own professional careers.
Approximately twelve hours ago, we dove into guidelines Zailig Pollock is currently developing for students working on the P.K. Page project, transcribing the work and encoding it with TEI, which in turn can be manipulated in various ways by XSLT to be viewed on the web through HTML. Though the practices he has adopted can not be applied to ever digitization endeavour, it was certainly heartening to see such a clear breakdown of practices. Since his guidelines are still being revised, they are not yet available, but they cover a system of colour coding, symbols, and ways of dealing with issues such as added lines, deleted lines, and illegibility that will ensure consistency in transcription.
The colour coding system demonstrates different versions of the text created by the author, including interventions authored at a later date, as well as the editorial decisions that have taken place. Earlier versions are in red, while final version in black so that this versioning is immediately apparent, while symbols also show where the author has made conscious changes, or simply mistakes which they revised themselves, over a period of time.
The advantage of having both the image of the document and the corresponding markup available online now becomes immediately apparent: by making explicit the choices of the editor, an unambiguous invitation for multiple valid readings is extended to the reader. The editor’s decisions should always be justified, but the ability to return to the text and change things globally, makes it easy to modify editorial decisions with ease.
Along with the decisions of the editor, the creative process of the original author becomes somewhat illuminated.The ability to pull up “incompletes”, or what have been judged to be mistakes on the part of the author, may seem somewhat absurd at first, but it does show off the places where potential for editorial intervention has taken place. The advantage of having both the image of the document and the corresponding markup available online now becomes immediately apparent: by making explicit the choices of the editor, an unambiguous invitation for multiple valid readings is extended to the reader. The editor’s decisions should always be justified, but the ability to return to the text and change things globally, makes it easy to modify editorial decisions with ease. One encoded, the user can pull different scenarios up out of the text, such as lists of emendations, regularizations, genetic views, and the authors own revisions. All of this goes to show the possibility that digitization affords us.
Next we spent some time with an example of P.K. Page’s work coded in oXygen. The basic aim of this kind of encoding is to outline a process, not simply describe the physical appearance of the page and essentially reproduce a transcriptions, but to get at the story behind the process through genetic editing.
Our guest speaker for the afternoon, Dr. Matt Huculak, an EMiC postdoctoral fellow, is concerned with finding and preserving find rare modernist periodicals, which he warns us are currently “dissolving in the archive– literally”. His talk, entitled “Blood on the Tracts: Preparing the Future Archive”, focused on the practicalities of creating the digital archive. It was incredibly pragmatic, (“be useful”, we were told) honest, (addressing the shifting demands of the profession in which we work) and stimulating (discussing the ability to manipulate our data in ways that will serve us no matter where we go in the world, or where the world goes through interdiciplinarity and connecting projects in complex environments).
Apparently, 80% of work in the digital archive is done in preparation. Here’s some quick and easy tips we learned today that will probably save us weeks of work in the future:
Scanning:
-figure out your equipment options, find what is available to you
-always scan as an uncompressed TIFF (avoid compressed formats like jpeg)
-never scan lower than 300dpi.
Backing Up:
be paranoid (so that you don’t have to run into a burning building to rescue your work from the freezer someday) and make sure that you have a backup plan in your workflow. In fact, have three:
-local disk
-backup disk
-cloud
File Naming:
-file naming is for your benefit, so make sure they are sortable according to what you will need.
-file names must be logical, use a heirarchy to name them.
-never put a space in your file name, and always use lower case letters
And finally, my favourite one…befriend a librarian! They know how things work. Also, they’re just cool people.
It’s also important to remember that you can’t do everything–you’re only human ( DHers are not “digital humans”), and you should only be doing work that serves to answer the question that you really want to ask.