As a digital humanities neophyte, I found the articles by Burnard and Gailey to provide both a straightforward overview of terms and processes, and a broad analysis of the benefits and pitfalls of text encoding and tagging. Gailey’s example of her team’s editorial decisions regarding the distinct (controversial) dialect of Joel Chandler Harris’s works made me wonder about how the DEMMR team (and other medievalist digital humanists) treat common idiosyncratic features of medieval texts, such as spelling inconsistencies, abbreviations and corrections. How, in other words, is what we call the “critical apparatus” translated into the digital realm? I look forward to learning more about this in our workshop. Burnard’s call for a standard text markup procedure also made me consider the commentaries and “tags” that medieval readers to which medieval readers would have had access–both on the page in the form of commentaries (such as editions of Bibles in which the text is surrounded by a Glossa Ordinaria or other commentary), illuminations or illustrations and corrections–and in their mind’s eye (references and connections to liturgy and scripture, for example). Not to be too trite, but I wonder how, in some ways, the creation of three-dimensional editions might sometimes draw us closer to, rather than further from, medieval reading experiences.
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