[Music- “Muzarka Op. 67 in A minor”] [Remus]
TEI stands for the text encoding initiative, which is a standardized set of guidelines
for manuscript digitization.
And one of the primary goals of this standardization is that all manuscripts are accessible in
the same way and available to researchers in a standardized format.
[Slaughter] When we first started the project, about ten
years ago, none of us, of course, knew how to text encode for the computers, so that
the data we put on the website could be searchable.
So, the people in the Digital Scholarship lab taught the students in my digital humanities
class the first time.
But the fourth time and every time since, one of the students has taught the other students.
This was the model for the whole project.
Basically, that people would train us and we would train the next generation of students.
[Wu] Because we are working on the transcription
that's been completed much, much, earlier, sometimes a few months, sometimes they’re
even older, so naturally we have to face some kind of problem if our own transcription or
TEI guidelines has changed over the time.
We have to, we as editors at the TEI team, will have to look into it very closely and
then, you know, make, sure everything is up and consistent with our current guidelines.
[Gordon] So, after the word documents go through several
rounds of editing through the transcription process, I transform the word documents into
XML documents using a phyton software.
Then what I do is distribute out these XML documents to be coded to our students, who
have some extensive coding experience.
What they do is insert codes for people, places, things, books, et cetera, anything we’ve
deemed relevant to have a hyperlink attached.
So, after this goes through several rounds of editing, the last person seeing them is
myself.
We then go ahead and put them through a linking process.
[Remus] I had absolutely no coding skills.
I had really never even seen the kind of colorful coding software.
It was all very foreign, so I was excited to learn a new skill and excited to apply
it to something that I was familiar with, which is archival research.
[Wu] I think with respect to what the TEI really
means, especially when we are able for across different institutions when we are putting
all these documents into the standardized form, it will be easy for any scholars, obviously,
to access them digitally.
But I think more importantly it will be easy for anyone who is interested in compiling
them into a huge database, or to say extract certain kind of trends of information from
all these humongous volumes of different manuscripts across different schools have done.
And it will be much, much, easier, or so to say we will be laying the foundation for someone
who, who will be doing some kind of larger data analysis writing of the periods that
we're dealing with.
[Remus] It's really cool how the digital archive allows
all the voices of the manuscript collection to be heard rather than just focusing on one.
And so through the digitization process, we're making people like me, like Fanny, we're about
the same age, accessible to researchers.
And I think that's one of the greatest benefits of having a completely digitized archive,
is making sure all the manuscript collection’s voices are accessible.
[Music- “Muzarka Op. 67 in A minor”]