Historical Interpretation through Multiple Markup: The Case of Horatio Nelson Taft's Diary, 1861-62

1
Historical Interpretation
through Multiple Markup:
The Case of Horatio Nelson
Taft's Diary, 1861-62
Garfinkel, Susan
sgarfinkel@loc.gov
Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA
Heckscher, Jurretta Jordan
jhec@loc.gov
Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA
1. Background
Now fifteen years old, the still-growing
American Memory Web site at the Library
of Congress (
http://memory.loc.gov/
) offers
more than 130 separate and diverse multi-
media collections — comprising more than a
million digitized library items — to a vast
base of virtual patrons across the Internet. Yet
despite radical changes in the ways that people
have come to use the World Wide Web, the
fundamental conception of American Memory
and its collections remains much as envisaged
fifteen years ago. What happens next to such
established but largely static digital resources?
Aside from implementing obvious upgrades
such as higher-resolution image scans, cleaned-
up OCR, fleshed-out metadata, or faceted search
capabilities, how might cultural repositories
more fundamentally enhance their existing
online content? Can we fully (re)imagine a
second iteration, a next generation, for already
digitized historical materials?
Our demonstration project works to consider
this question for a single American Memory
collection, purposely setting aside issues
of scale or interoperability in favor of
exploring effective and compelling ways to
convey to users the particular character of
specific historical resources. Starting with
the unpublished manuscript diary of Horatio
Nelson Taft (1861-62), already digitized
(as textual transcription with page images)
at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/tafthtml/taf
thome.html
, we have chosen to explore the
implications of creating several alternate and
explicitly interpretive frameworks by applying
multiple XML markup to this bounded but
compellingly dense and historically significant
text.
American Memory patrons bring unusually
diverse research needs to the same body
of historical materials: typical users include
everyone from elementary school students
and hobbyists to lawyers, librarians, college
professors and members of Congress. Our
project’s concerns stem from this diversity
as well as from our own role as scholars
of American culture working with historical
materials in a library setting. Traditional
library practice treats sources as analytically
separate from their interpretation, even while
the most basic interventions of librarianship
are fundamentally interpretive. Historians, by
contrast, well recognize their own work with
sources as interpretive, but still tend to view
textual sources as fully fixed in meaning.
Textual analysis is an underdeveloped tool
in American historical study, and history
as a discipline has lagged behind literature
in imagining computing as a threshold for
innovative research. Historians’ traditional use
of computing has trended quantitative rather
than qualitative, while recent innovations
emphasize creating tools to assist the mechanics
of research or scholarly interaction rather
than transforming them. Explorations of how
computing might fundamentally change the
practices of history or the outcomes of historical
interpretation are still needed.
Against this background the Taft Diary project
takes on several related goals: (1) to visibly
demonstrate a historical text’s accessibility to
multiple simultaneous interrogations enacted
through digital scholarship; (2) to more fully
explore the multidimensionality of a significant
historical text; (3) to introduce the methods and
questions of digital humanists more centrally
into a library context (making them better
known to library practitioners and more widely
available to diverse library audiences); and (4)
to meld the questions and methods of historians
with the advances in digital textual scholarship
arising among literary scholars. With our project
we hope to establish a model for text-based
scholarship — literary and ethnographic as well
as historical — that foregrounds the individual
user’s interpretative needs while also conveying

2
that interpretation to the broad variety of the
diary's potential users.
2. The artifact and its text
The Horatio Nelson Taft Diary commands wide
historical interest. When it was introduced
to the public on the Library’s Web site in
2001, it offered the first new information
about the events of Abraham Lincoln’s death
to come to light in half a century. In fact the
diary emerges from the confluence of multiple
transformative historical developments: not
only the American Civil War and Lincoln’s
presidency, but profound long-term changes
including the rise of the American middle
class; the nation’s industrial, technological, and
consumer revolutions; the decisive expansion in
the size and influence of the federal government;
and the maturation of Washington, DC, as
a complex urban community of national and
international importance.
An exceptional historical record on many levels,
the Taft Diary is also unusually well suited to an
experiment in simultaneous multidimensional
interpretive markup. Its contents are rich in
the overlap of ordinary life and significant
events, people, and places, thereby appealing
both to specialized historians and to a broad
general audience. Its limited size offers definite
boundaries to the range, though not the depth,
of interpretive markup. Moreover, the formulaic
pattern underlying most of its daily entries
invites ready comparison while ensuring an
organizing degree of structural regularity.
Taft’s three-volume manuscript diary consists
of daily entries from January 1, 1861, through
April 11, 1862 (the end of vol. 1), and less
frequent entries through May 30, 1865. The
current phase of our project deals only with vol.
1, which contains in total 466 entries. Because
Taft used a printed blank diary book for vol. 1,
each 1861 entry is eleven handwritten lines long,
or typically ninety to one hundred words (fig. 1).
(The volume’s 1862 entries, written into pages
intended for back matter, vary more in length.)
Beyond the consistency of the entries’ length,
certain content elements recur so frequently as
to be almost formulaic: information about the
weather, illnesses within and beyond the family
circle, political and military news about the Civil
War, and the people and locations that populate
Taft’s daily life.
Figure 1: Taft Diary vol. 1, entries for Sept.
19-21, 1861; transcription of Sept. 20 entry
3. Implementation
In selecting markup schemas, we considered
and discarded a number of interpretive
typologies, including Library of Congress
Subject Headings (LCSH) (
http://www.loc.gov
/aba/cataloging/subject/
) and the Library of
Congress Classification Outline (
http://www.l
oc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/
), because they turn
out to lack a consistent level of granularity
across cultural and historical domains. Seeking
to demonstrate applicability and variety, for
phase one we selected three schemas for their
breadth as well as depth, their flexibility, and
their inherent relevance to the content of our
text:
1.
TEI,
http://www.tei-c.org/
2.
Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM),
http://
www.yale.edu/hraf/outline.htm
3.
Scholar-defined “webs of significance” such
as:
i.
Taft’s recurring concerns
a.
weather
b.
places

3
c.
illness
ii.
networks
a.
of social relationships
b.
how news is conveyed
These three schemas together provide for
theoretical and well as methodological diversity,
representing a variety of approaches to the
analysis of historical texts. TEI is a widely used
standard for the representation of texts in digital
form, with well-developed editorial standards
and an established community of users. The
OCM is anthropological, deriving from attempts
to develop comprehensive categorizations of
human cultural phenomena. Scholar-defined
“webs of significance” follow from our own close
readings of the text. In the future we anticipate
exploring additional markup typologie based in
the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (
http:/
/www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/tgm/
), GIS,
and data visualizations, so as to demonstrate the
diversity and versatility of interpretation that
simultaneous multiple markup can sustain.
Our baseline text for markup is the transcription
of Taft’s vol. 1, which was originally provided in
SGML mapped to the American Memory DTD.
Our own markup reverses normalizations in
transcription in favor of a diplomatic version,
and strips out the older SGML tags.
Implementation raises methodological and
technical challenges. In our process we must
move from theoretical issues to the development
of standards for each tag category, exploring
the dilemmas that intensive and self-created
markup entails: for example, whether phrases
or sentences should be the unit of markup with
OCM tags (fig. 2). Resolving such questions
requires us to confront the practical challenges
of creating markup conventions originally based
in theory rather than established practice.
Theoretical language about multiplicity is
inspiring — and even starts to get at the truth
of lived experience — but in practice we must
also make sound choices about how to complete
the markup with reasonable consistency so that
others may use and rely on it. Further, do we
mark the same text multiple times, or invest
ourselves in some version of a standoff markup
(see the XStandoff toolkit, for example)? How do
we best present multiple interpretive options to
our audience? At this level, the Taft Diary project
is still a work in progress.
Figure 2: Text of Taft Diary vol. 1, Sept. 20 entry
showing conceptual phrase-level OCM markup
4. Conclusion
We anticipate that simultaneous multiple
markup will render the text dynamic, surfacing
its performative and ritualized aspects; and that
it will invite new attention to its literary and
linguistic aspects. Markup can also foreground
key aspects of worldview of which the writer
himself was unaware. In these and other
ways, simultaneous multiple markup becomes
a new instrument of historical interpretation,
reimagining analysis beyond the realm of
narrative prose.
While our technical questions are not yet fully
answered, and the project itself is ongoing, we
seek to share important methodological and
theoretical questions, and our conclusions so
far, with our colleagues in digital humanities.
References
Cohen, Daniel J., Rosenzweig, Roy
(2006).
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering,
Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/
.

4
Geertz, Clifford
(1973). 'Thick Description'.
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays.
New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30.
McGann, Jerome
(2004). 'Marking Texts of
Many Dimensions'.
A Companion to Digital
Humanities.
Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray,
Unsworth, John (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
198-217.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/c
ompanion/
.
Milligan, Frank D.
(2007). 'A City in Crisis:
The Wartime Diaries of Horatio Nelson Taft'.
President Lincoln’s Cottage.
entry of August
1
, blog.
http://lincolncottage.wordpress.com/
2007/08/01/a-city-in-crisis-the-wartime-di
aries-of-horation-nelson-taft/
.
Sellers, John
(February 2002). 'Washington
in Crisis, 1861-1865: Library Acquires the Diary
of Horatio Nelson Taft'.
Library of Congress
Information.
Bulletin 61, no. 2
.
http://www.
loc.gov/loc/lcib/0202/cw-diarist.html
.
Stührenberg, Maik, Jettka, Daniel
(2009).
'A Toolkit for Multi-Dimensional Markup: The
Development of SGF to XStandoff'.
Proceedings
of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009.
Balisage Series on Markup Technologies. 3
vols.
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vo
l3/html/Stuhrenberg01/BalisageVol3-Stuhren
berg01.html
.