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ОглавлениеTeaching Text Encoding in the Madre María de San José (México 1656–1719) Digital Project
University of Alabama
University of Alabama
Southern Methodist University
THE ALABAMA DIGITAL HUMANITIES CENTER, part of the University Libraries and located in the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the heart of the University of Alabama campus, has played a prominent role in fostering both research and teaching using digital humanities. In the fall of both 2015 and 2016, Dr. Emma Wilson, Mary Alexander, and Dr. Connie Janiga-Perkins partnered to team teach the graduate course Readings in Women’s Spiritual Autobiography: Language, Materiality, and Identity in Colonial Spanish American Texts using Digital Humanities.
The team-taught course was composed of four four-week segments that introduced students to the traditional literary research and paleography skills necessary to work with historic manuscripts and then to the thoroughly modern process of using text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to translate student transcription and research into a digital edition of part of one of the texts they studied. The first segment consisted of an extensive study of history, literary criticism, and bibliography of and primary sources by women authors of the Spanish American colonial period and focused on the spiritual autobiographies of two Spanish American nuns. The first, Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (b. 1669), was a black-veiled sister in the Order of Poor Clares in Bogotá (Colombia). She resided in the Convent of Santa Clara her entire professed life until her death in 1727. María de San José (b. 1656, d. 1719) was an Augustinian Recollect nun from New Spain (México), who professed at the Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla and later founded the Convent of Soledad in Oaxaca.
Women such as María and Jerónima were taught that they were inferior in every way to men. From this early training as well as from other cultural and societal messages throughout their lives, women internalized a deep sense of inferiority, a belief that they were more given to emotion than logic, more deceptive than men, more capable of morally questionable behavior, and, therefore, in need of a stern, guiding (male) hand. Early in life that guidance was provided by the father of the family, or another strong male figure such as a grandfather or uncle. In adulthood, the honorable options for these (upper-class) women were marriage, the convent, and in some rare cases spinsterhood under the protection of a brother or another male family member.
María de San José and Jerónima Nava y Saavedra chose the convent, where they confronted not only a strong system of female authority but the “heavy male hand” of their confessors and the church hierarchy. Their autobiographical accounts portray their lives, both spiritual and worldly, and show the maturing of their agency despite often-harsh treatment by their confessors. The survival of these women’s writing depended exclusively on the male authority exercised within the colonial church. Since few authenticated manuscripts of this type survive from the colonial era, it is especially important to create new opportunities for both their preservation and their dissemination.
The second segment concentrated on the art and theory of critical editing, with in-depth rereading of the primary sources from what Stuart Hall calls negotiated positioning.1 Emphasis was placed on readings by Peter Shillingburg, Leah Marcus, David Greetham, Leroy Searle, John Lennard, and Zachary Lesser. Segment three consisted of a study of basic paleography and transcription techniques appropriate for women’s writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spanish America. After a bit of practice, the project began. The classes transcribed unpublished portions of The Life Story of María de San José. We are grateful to the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, for the 1,200-page manuscript.
In the fourth and final segment of the courses, the class moved to the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, where Mary Alexander and Dr. Emma Wilson taught the students text encoding and how to make a digital edition. (See fig. 4.1.)
Figure 4.1. Manuscript page from Maria de San Jose Oaxaca Manuscript 87R.
ENCODING A DIGITAL EDITION
The Environment
The Alabama Digital Humanities Center provided tools needed to encode a digital edition. The Macs had oXygen, an extensible markup language (XML) editor, installed on them. Big screens displayed slides and oXygen’s screen. A whiteboard was used to record discussion points. This facility provided an ideal group learning environment.
The Team
The students were divided into groups of twos or threes. They would switch roles of encoder and proofreader. Mary Alexander led the instruction in using oXygen as an encoder and in the metadata principles governing TEI; Connie Janiga-Perkins led the literary research questions and conundrums presented by transcribing and encoding the text, specifically with regard to making the transition between the manuscript itself and a digital version; and Emma Annette Wilson mediated the discussions, asking questions about the links between the choices being made within the encoding, the transcription, and the original manuscript itself and extrapolating broader principles of digital scholarship at work within the scenario.
Teaching TEI
The TEI’s customized schema, TEI Lite, was the best fit for the project with its set of basic elements for encoding a digital edition, a strong community of members, and its tools to support the creation of digital editions. Students were instructed to open an oXygen TEI P5 Lite template that provided the root element, list of namespaces, TEI header, and body sections in a valid TEI document. After discussion on the purpose of the namespaces, we started immediately encoding the text body. TEI header work was scheduled for the last class.
The students were instructed to paste the transcription in between the opening and closing tags of the paragraph element. A lesson on the importance of opening and closing tags in a well-formed document included information about the XML, an independent language used to store and transport data, the foundation of TEI’s syntax. The line break element (<lb/>) was needed at the beginning of each prose line to mark a boundary point separating sections of text. Students were introduced to an XML syntax called milestones in TEI. oXygen’s abilities as an XML editor with its internal support for TEI was demonstrated as it automatically provided a closing tag before students could finish typing the complete tag.
The groups of students were assigned pages of the diary to encode. Elements were needed for diacritics, strikethroughs, and superscripts to indicate abbreviations in the manuscript. Students learned about the UTF-8 character set. When a character with a diacritic was not supported by this character set, it would need additional inquiry for identification. Beginning with this unidentified character, a list of characters with unresolved encodings was compiled for future reference. Meanwhile, the class progressed from simple encodings to complex nested elements and elements with attributes. These gave the students opportunities to learn correct syntax for sustaining a well-formed and valid document.
The class discussions centered on possible encodings. Some thought that an element should be used to emphasize strikethroughs with thick dark markings, to indicate text being emphatically crossed out. The discussion on bold strikethroughs segued into a discussion about the meaning of diplomatic edition, an encoded text that is a literal transcription of the original document, including its physical structure and its variations. In this way, the digital teaching approach illuminated traditional editorial debates, bringing them to life afresh for a modern student group.
Within the manuscript, marginalia included words in the left margin, Arabic number with an alpha character in the right margin, and a drawing of a cross in the center. All were encoded to represent the original text layout. The words in the left margin were encoded as a segment as it was decided earlier that the document did not have text divisions. The cross required a glyph element to contain the URL to the cross’s image. The students decided to use the glyph’s subelement, desc (description) in which they supplied the basic description, “Religious cross.” The glyph and desc elements served as an introduction to the larger TEI P5 standard, as they were beyond TEI Lite’s schema. The TEI community’s ROMA tool was introduced to produce a customized schema with the glyph element and its subelement for validation and documentation. With each additional element outside TEI Lite, the ROMA tool provided the needed documentation. This example of advanced encoding was crucial in allowing students hands-on experience of the possibilities opened up by TEI.
oXygen’s feature to transform the encoded text to a web page display served as an aid for proofreading and visualization of the digital edition’s layout. It was a favorite of one student based on her remarks and repeated use of it.
The TEI header elements are similar to a library catalog record with more elements. The header contained a source description element for describing the digital edition. For this element, the students thoughtfully crafted statements about their edition, and in this part of the class they had an opportunity to formalize some of the editorial principles that they had been discussing during their encoding sessions. The header include an annotated bibliography compiled by the students.
These encodings will be part of the iteration performed on the remaining raw text until it is completely transformed into a digital edition by future classes. The last class will perform final proofreading and edits.
OUTCOMES AND ONWARD
Team teaching this iterative graduate class is enabling students to engage in the creation of original research that will result in a substantive, lasting outcome once the digital edition is launched. Students were able to benefit from combined expertise in Hispanist studies and in digital techniques, and the sum of that experience generated a detailed knowledge both of their early colonial manuscript and its nuances and of the editorial dilemmas faced within a scholarly digital environment. The union of very traditional paleography and bibliography skills with cutting-edge digital techniques gives students a good foundation in both areas of their chosen field, preparing them for both onward research and, pragmatically, the job market.
Team teaching also made it possible for the students to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time, as their discussions were mediated by the voices and research specializations of all three faculty members leading the class sessions. This setup created a truly immersive environment for the students, one that precisely models a modern research collaboration in the humanities and also that embodies the dynamics of a professional conference in the field. These intellectual experiences provide valuable professionalization opportunities for students that go beyond tangible skills of text encoding and into broader intellectual benefits, such as gaining confidence in speaking with professors on an equal footing as a fellow researcher and arguing for your point of view when particular encoding decisions had to be made. Team teaching can be administratively difficult, but it is well worth advocating for in order to give students an immersive, wide-ranging learning experience. In this instance, students’ work will, down the road, be visible online as part of the completed digital edition of the spiritual manuscript, giving them a lasting testament to their research and enabling them to have their first taste of contributing to their field in a permanent way, and it was all made possible via collaboration.
NOTE
1. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980: 128—38). Hall espouses three possible approaches or means a reader can use to position himself or herself when decoding a text: the dominant or hegemonic, the negotiated, and the oppositional. For Hall, decoding a work using the negotiated approach lets readers acknowledge the hegemonic definitions at work in the process while reserving the right to make a more negotiated examination of the text. Such an approach allows us to decode María’s Vida in a manner that takes into account the situational level, where we may find exceptions to the hegemonic reading and/or create new ground rules for approaching the text (137–38).
