TEI- The Exciting Innovation

I'm having way too much fun coming up with what TEI could stand for (see Nov. 4 posting.) However, the new title reflects my new attitude towards coding- it's cool!

The example above is pretty indicative of what I've been doing for the last 4 hours. I know that it's hard to see, but you all pretty much know what computer code looks like, don't you? (Maybe I'm weird, though. I did date a computer geek for 5+ years...) But anyway, I'm having a great time with this. It's fascinating to figure out the things that you're supposed to mark up in a document. I'm coding a play, I'm still only on the first scene, and I've already got:

1. 26 footnotes.
2. Three different categories of names.
3. Three different categories of places.
4. A way to look at words both with their archaic and modern spellings.
5. Divisions between speakers, speeches, lines, scenes, line groups, etc.
6. A really funky way that I have to code an ampersand (&) and an emdash(—) LOL. My blog thinks that my code for & and -- are the real thing, so I can see it, but you can't. That amuses me for some strange reason. Probably because I've been coding for 4 hours straight!
   

Of course, all of the above things take a TON of code to say. I’d show you, but my blog wants to think that it’s HTML and do weird things to my font, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. It’s not exactly the most efficient process, but it's going to be so cool when it's done! And yes, my fancy schmancy coding program does make it all pretty colours like in the picture. Much easier on the eyes.

So, I'm admitting that I was wrong at the beginning. Coding isn't so scary. It's really quite logical, and it makes you read with so much more depth than you do normally, because you have to keep an eye out for all of the things that you should be tagging. I’ve already got tags for: historical people, mythological people, semi-historical people, mythological places, real places, words that have archaic spellings, words that have difficult meanings, things that need to be indented, italicized, underlined…the list goes on. It turns out that TEI stands for Turns out to be Extremely Interesting. Wish me luck in getting it done, and I’ll post the link for my finished play when it’s online. Should be near the beginning of December. Happy early Christmas to me!

TEI- The Evil Invention

Sigh...no, that's not actually what TEI stands for. It stands for Text Encoding Initiative. It's an XML based language developed to code literature for online applications. And it's evil. And I'm expected to learn it.

In one of my courses, Digital Print Culture & Romanticism, my major assignment is to edit, annotate, and code a closet drama (a play never meant to be staged) by John Thelwall (left) called The Fairy of the Lake. There is already an online version of it, but it sucks (lots of mistakes, very hard to read, no explanatory notes), so my job is to make a better one. It's worth 60% of my grade. If you get a chance, read the play. It's bloody hilarious! But that doesn't make TEI any more palatable.

The past 10 weeks or so, we've spent our classes learning editing theory (man, is there a lot of stuff that's important! Some scholars are way too concerned with the kind of paper books are printed on), deciding what's important to code, and researching the footnotes for whatever we're editing (each of us is doing a different work by Thelwall.) Yesterday, it was time to learn how to actually CODE the thing. Two hours certainly wasn't enough. I'm a fairly computer literate person, and yet it took me two hours this morning just to create the TEI header (a set of identifying tags that provide all of the important information about the file and what's in it.) This is going to take forever.

I think we've all seriously underestimated how much work this is going to be (especially my prof, since she has even less of a grasp of this than most of us do.) It should be interesting, though...