Last month I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute held at the University of Victoria in British Columbia to take a class entitled “Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application” led by Connie Compton and Lee Zickel.
This class focused on TEI, or the Text Encoding Initiative, which provides guidelines for encoding texts to make them machine-readable. Encoding texts is the first step to doing textual analysis. I have had an interest in textual analysis for awhile, but it’s not something I have been able to explore much on my own. Though TEI is something you could learn by yourself, having people with professional experience guide you through the basics and answer your questions makes a world of difference. In only a week I knew enough to fully encode both newspaper articles and chunks of female preaching memoirs.
Before this course I had no familiarity with any TEI, but I have worked with markup languages to update the blog for Religious Ecologies in Visual Studio Code. This meant I could dive in and handle the basics relatively quickly.
Here is the backend of the Oxygen XML Editor we used for the course. This shows what it looks like to encode text using TEI.
Figure 1. The backend of Oxygen XML Editor showing a marked up page from a memoir.
This image shows a page from Nancy Towle’s memoir Vicissitudes Illustrated, in the Experience of Nancy Towle, in Europe and America , published in 1832, a source I have used for both my master’s thesis and my current dissertation research. As you can see, I have broken each line up individually and included markup to accurately reflect the appearance of the text, such as having italicization or capitalized letters. TEI can also encode images and other visual elements on the page – however, my source base has very few of this, though I learned the basics of encoding imagery through the course.
Other choices that I made for this project include creating two different personagraphies, or lists of people mentioned throughout the text. The first personagraphy includes historical actors mentioned in Towle’s memoir, including other female preachers, male clergy, family members, church members, and those converted. The second personagraphy is for Biblical figures, including God, Jesus, and others mentioned, often to argue for the Biblicalness of female preaching. By having two personagraphies, I can encode all mentions of people and Biblical figures separately. This will let me analyze the mentions of Biblical figures present throughout female preaching memoirs.
Other elements that I am encoding include references to scripture, where I link out to an online Bible so the full verse/chapter can be seen, and including geographic information about places Towle traveled to and preached at. This, plus the personagraphies, will allow me to do multiple types of analysis. Between the encoded Bible verses and the Bible personagraphy, I will be able to analyze what Bible stories and Bible figures are referenced to create an argument for the validity of female preaching. The personagraphy of historical actors will make network analysis possible , especially to study nodes of support that female preachers utilize to bolster their ministries. Finally, the geographic information will allow me to map the locations of preaching engagements and show the geographic spread of female preaching in both the United States and Canada and Britain.
Though I have done some network analysis and mapping prior to using TEI, using Oxygen and having all of my encoding done in the same location will let me to link together all of my analysis and explore research questions with the same data.
Figure 2. The published page of a marked-up memoir page held at the TAPAS Project site.
Caroline Greer 