MS Y

As you know, in the last few weeks I have posted reviews on the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archive (DEA) and an article by Martha Nell Smith that explains and expands on the process of creating this electronic archive. To continue my exploration of this process, I choose Manuscript Y because it is obviously an example of a Dickinson "letter-poem," a label fraught with ambiguity because it does not clearly fit either genre category. The decisions surrounding the encoding of these hybrid texts was a central debate in Smith's article; she used the "letter-poem" to explicate the complicated work done by the encoders collaborating on the DEA. In order to have a better understanding of the world of electronic textual scholarship, I have embarked on a Textual Encoding (TEI) experiment. Although I can read programming language, I have not studied TEI, and therefore am teaching myself using the "TEI By Example Project."

The transcription posted on the Dropbox is the product of many hours attempting to implement a small swath of the man possibilities TEI affords the encoder. For instance, I have used the TEI format for a letter, but labeled it a poem. I use the tag for headers and closers to mark that this letter was addressed to Martha Dickinson and Sally Jenkins, which is explained in my annotation. Although many representations of this poem format the first section as a paragraph of prose and the section as a poetic stanza, I use the "p" tag to indicate "paragraph" for both, which is how the manuscript appears to me. I also write moments of ambiguous punctuation in the text. I wish I had more time and the guidance of an expert to fully explore the tagging options I could use to enhance this text, but I did learn a lot from this foray into the unknown. A final note, I have also embedded hypertext links into the text which lead the reader to Wikipedia sites explaining abstract references used by Dickinson in her letter.

If anyone has more experience with TEI than I do, and can offer suggestions, I would be very grateful.