We Built it. Can They?: Text Encoding and the Humanities Scholar

We Built it. Can They?: Text Encoding and the
Humanities Scholar

Hope
Greenberg
Academic Computing University of
Vermont
hope.greenberg@uvm.edu

1999

University of Virgiinia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Text Encoding Initiative's "Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange" has had a profound impact on the innovators and early adopters of
the electronic text world. Given the technical difficulties associated with
creating these documents, it is not surprising that early adopters have tended
to be large groups with resources to devote exclusively to these projects.
But is there a compelling pedagogical benefit to individual humanities scholar in
creating TEI-encoded electronic texts? Should individual scholars be creators or
simply consumers?
The University of Vermont is exploring these questions. With volunteer and
student help, the Special Collections Department of the University's Bailey/Howe
Library is digitizing their Finding Aids using the EAD DTD and building a page
image and transcription collection of selected works using the TEI DTD and Model
Editions Partnership (MEP) DTD.
Individual faculty and student projects underway include a page image backed by
indexed OCR'd text edition of Godey's Lady's Book, the popular 19th century
American magazine, as well as more deeply encoded editions of various works.
Faculty workshops and an undergraduate course are also proposed, the resulting
projects to be included in the University's electronic text collections.
For these projects the questions kept at the forefront are: can this model be
duplicated by individuals or small groups with limited resources while remaining
in concert with the broader text encoding world?
The assumption that because early adopters have created electronic texts, a
majority of humanities scholars will or should do so, represents a large chasm.
Unless the scholarly and pedagogical benefits derived from the creation, rather
than just the consumption, of these texts is sufficient to offset the difficulty
of undertaking such projects, that chasm may remain unbridgeable.

References

David
Chesnutt

The Model Editions Partnership--Towards a National
Database

Paper presented at the ACH/ALLC Joint Conference,
1997

1997

Available online: <>

William
H.
Geoghegan

Whatever Happened to Instructional Technology?

Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the
International Business Schools Computing Association, Baltimore, MD,
1994

1994

Geoffrey
A.
Moore

Crossing the Chasm

New York
Harper Business
1991

Everett
M.
Rogers

The Diffusion of Innovations

NY
The Free Press
1995

Perry
Willett

Issues in Project Cooperation II: Markup Issues

Presented at the ACH/ALLC Joint Conference,
1998

1998

Available online: <>

University of Vermont Electronic Text
Collections

currently at <> and <>.
Both moving to <> in late
spring of 1999.