Last week we finished our introduction to TEI and started our group work of this semester.
TEI Introduction III
For the TEI part of the class we dealt with common mishaps that occurred in our TEI documents of the folktale “Why the Python’s Skin has Dark-Brown Blotches” which we worked on the week before. None were major mishaps, but they are still parts of the code that are important for the document to come together. These mishaps included: forgetting <head type=”subTitle”> to indicate subtitles in the document, closing divisions too soon, and – which wasn’t really a mishap at all – that we don’t need to use the <q>-tag anymore if we use a division for ‘song’.
Then we talked about how best to encode notes and glossaries by using a <list>-tag.
Another thing before we started with our group work was, that we talked about the issue that XML:IDs need to be unique, meaning that they can only be used once in the whole document, which proves difficult, if we want to ID the same term throughout a folktale. The work-around we decided on for this problem is that we will only ID the first instance a term comes up in a folktale, and only that one time. This also works great with our aim to foreignize the folktale for its readers, as only having an explanation for the first time an unknown term comes up means that the reader will have to engage with a folktale on a close level to understand it completely.
Just before starting the group work, we were shown a website that changes TEI documents to PDF (or other formats) so that we can check – after having finished with the code – whether everything has been correctly transferred or not. (You can find the link to the website here.) This is quite useful because we can avoid mistakes that we might not have seen with the preview feature in Visual Studio Code.
Group WOrk
And lastly for last week’s class we got together in our groups, decided on a folktale to work on, and started with that. Working on our own folktales was really doable thanks to the introduction to TEI the previous three weeks, and therefore I want to thank Jana and Tasun again for providing us with so much in-class information and answering our questions!
Thanks again, Anne, for sharing your thoughts. Definitely a good recap of our class discussions and activities. Have fun working in your groups!