Opposite to distant reading, close reading places great emphasis on the single particular over the general, makes us paying close attention to individual words. In the past few weeks, we did close reading from transcribing the Payne Journal in the Juxta Editions, learn TEL-compliant XML markup and use the Oxygen editor to markup the transcriptions. Also, we used these tools to publish the edition of Payne Journal on the web instead of in print. Juxta Editions allows us to compare the original documents and our transcription words by words. However, it only can do the subscription, simple tags of person, place and time on the transcription. In contrast, Oxygen helps us tag more parameters such as the event, object and trait. By marking up the parameters, I gained a different aspect understanding of the journal. The name of the place, the emotion of the role, and other contents in detail, which might be ignored by distance reading, was impressed in my head when I did the markup. I started to think about the relationship between the places, the emotion of the role and the event happened deeply. Now, let me talk more about my experience of using these tools to edit documents that published on the web with Elena Pierazzao’s article “ A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions”.
As Pierazzao stated that scholarly choices constitute the base of any transcription and subsequent diplomatic edition, when I was doing the markup, I have to make a choice on the source. There are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded and my goal is to edit as many of the characteristics of the journal as I can. Therefore, it is a challenge for me on how to choose, which features of the primary source I should reproduce, and where shall I stop? Pierazzao said that we must have limits on the selection based on the scholarly purpose. So, I decided to markup documents by choosing one category of parameters at one time. For example, based on the nature of the journal, I did markup for place name that I read through the entire page and only highlight all the place names.
In that way, I can ensure all the parameters I need are reproduced while I will not mark mass useless words. Also, in order to ensure the uniform of our decision as an entire Journal, we created a Google document in class to share the editorial decision to we made.
Another decisive challenge for editing is the design and style of the web. I chose white background with black text at the beginning, but after I thought about the comfortableness of the reader to read and search online for the best matched background, I changed the web to a black background with white text.
Since this document is a travel journal, the places they traveled and the emotion of the role in the journal is important, I mark the color of the place names to yellow and emotion to red. I also changed the font style of the misspelling in case od readers’ misunderstanding.
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