NINES Discussion: Markup, Whitman and TEI

Barney's "'Each Part and Tag of...

Barney's "'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass" was a great example of the quandaries posed with markup. Part of the issue with works of long dead authors is that you are trying to interpret layout and attribute stylistic choices for someone who cannot tell you what they really meant. Barney's discussion of "Thoughts" and "Says" shows such a situation. I think the coding needs to be true to the physical edition, not to what the encoder thinks the author meant.

Indeed.  Discussions of au...

Indeed. Discussions of authorial intent often cause contention, and this object shows how even so-called "descriptive" markup is no different. The markup is, in a way, only as descriptive as the taggers' own interpretations.

Will, your exhibit reflects you...

Will, your exhibit reflects your dual interests in encoding and poetry. I found the observation from Barney concerning “TEI’s love of structure” intriguing, first, because of the personification in that phrase, and second, because of the notion of conflicting structures. I’m grateful that our own encoding experience dealt with prose, as that provided adequate challenges, but I’m interested in your own experience working with poetry in XML. Do you relate to Barney’s experience? Do you find yourself working with or against TEI-imposed structure in your own composing?

Alas, I have not had much exper...

Alas, I have not had much experience with poetry in TEI except for my own amateur exploration. However, I am one who likes structure, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me that I chose the intersection of these two for this exhibit without consciously deciding to do so.

Of course, I feel like structured poetry especially would go hand-in-hand with TEI markup of it. For example, take a villanelle (Wikipedia has a good outline of the form, but links don't seem to be embedding the way I want them to in this interface), a rigidly structured 19-line poem whose requirements are initially challenging to overcome, but one that neatly falls into place once you've figured out the interlocking necessities. I haven't ever tagged one, but I think TEI would do splendidly with it using lines with line numbering attributes, anchor identifications, and xml:id attributes.

Similarly, I know TEI has plenty of tags for meters and rhyme schemes, which I have previously played with on my own. In short, given the way I like to write and read poetry, I think TEI would complement it nicely.

Pardon me for jumping into this...

Pardon me for jumping into this conversation, but I wonder what would happen if you tried to TEI encode some concrete poetry. In Dr. Kate Oliver's class, she asked us to submit 2 to 3 poems related to spatial issues for our last class, and so my friend Blake and I looked up some concrete poems via Google Images: link.

What happens when the structure of the poem is integral to the meaning and content of the poem? Would you instead turn to including digital images of these poems rather than transcribing and TEI tagging them?

Part of the issue with works of...

Part of the issue with works of long dead authors is that you are trying to interpret layout and attribute stylistic choices for someone who cannot tell you what they really meant. Barney's discussion of "Thoughts" and "Says" shows such a situation. I’m grateful that our own encoding experience dealt with prose, as that provided adequate challenges, but I’m interested in your own experience working with poetry in XMLI feel like structured poetry especially would go hand-in-hand with TEI markup of it.

Thanks
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