Re: A question about encoding and text fixing platforms for undergraduate curators

HI Martin,
If you have students coming for **six weeks** to work at the Folger, why not orient them to writing and working the code? I work regularly with undergrads, and it takes about one week for them to orient themselves to angle brackets and oXygen. Also, I don’t believe that most undergrads “know” Microsoft Word especially well. Why create extra work with making Microsoft styles force-fit to plain simple sparse code?

In my experience (regularly, from Fall 2012 onward), students take like ducks to the water and tend to appreciate working directly with the angle bracket code. Seems to me a six week institute is a perfect opportunity to teach them to code as part of the experience! 

Elisa
-- 
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
Director, Center for the Digital Text | Associate Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg | Humanities Division
150 Finoli Drive
Greensburg, PA  15601  USA
E-mail: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Development site: http://newtfire.org <http://newtfire.org/>






> On Apr 26, 2017, at 7:09 PM, Martin Mueller <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I’m not sure whether this is a sensible question to ask, but I’ll ask it anyhow.
>  
> This summer we’ll have a number of undergraduate curators of TCP texts fixing this and that, mainly incompletely transcribed words, but sometimes longer stretches of text or whole pages.
>  
> So we’ll some transcription platform in addition to an eXist site at http://shc.earlprint.org <http://shc.earlprint.org/>,  where single words can be fixed by changing the value of the content to of a <w> element, mercifully invisible to the user.
>  
> If you believe that the best tool is the tool you know best, you’d try to figure out whether undergraduates could do this work using Microsoft Word with a set of styles that subsequently support the automatic transformation of the Microsoft word passages into XML fragments that can be fitted into the TCP transcriptions.
>  
> Is that a plausible scenario and has something like that been done? TCP encoding is quite sparse. Text is either marked (inside <hi>) or unmarked, and the transcription is silent about what the unmarked state is.  My rough guess is that a dozen elements will cover the vast majority of cases.
>  
> The Folger Library has an attractive Web-based tool for manuscript transcription that can probably be adjusted with little trouble.
>  
> The students will be in residence for six weeks, and it may be that we should teach them encoding with oXygen. Some of them may love it, others may hate it.
>  
> I’d be grateful for advice and practical war stories about what does and does not work.