Exploring New Worlds in Old Texts: Text Encoding Projects for the Undergraduate Study of Spanish American Colonial Literature

Teaching Spanish colonial literature to undergraduate
students is a difficult pedagogical task, because students
in that level don’t have an extensive knowledge of the language
of the times or the books’ historical context. Indeed, graduate
classes and even scholars writing in the field rarely grapple
with the early modern editions themselves, because of their
accessibility and because they can be so difficult to penetrate.
A scholarly collection of essays by Danny Anderson and Jill
S. Kuhnheim, that discusses strategies for teaching this material,
encourages an approach to these texts based on cultural theory
and literary criticism rather than on a close examination of the
texts themselves. At Wheaton College (Norton, MA), on the
contrary, we have spent the last two years experimenting with
a different approach: students’ direct involvement with a digital
portion of a colonial text (supported by digital cartographic
evidence from the period, and mediated by the faculty’s
suggestions) enhances their comprehension and interest for the
actual original book.
In three literature classes undergraduate students have
contributed to the creation of a digital critical edition of a 16th
century Spanish rare book: Libro de los Infortunios y Naufragios
(Book of the Misfortunes and Shipwrecks) by Gonzalo
Fernández de Oviedo, partially published in Seville in 1535,
as part of the La Historia General de las Indias (General
History of the West Indies). To date Fernandez de Oviedo’s
shipwreck narrative has received only scant scholarly attention
by literary critics because of the rarity of the book and
accessibility to the XVI century printed edition (Kohut).
The class goal is to produce a digital edition of Fernandez de
Oviedo’s book. The process comprises a variety of steps, aimed
to direct students’ attention to the texts themselves, their
structure, the meaning of words and phrases, and even of
individual letters. Students first learn to use accurate
transcription techniques and electronic textual editing practices,
and then move on to the text encoding based on an XML
encoding scheme developed by the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI). We have found that using the TEI encoding is an
effective pedagogical tool because, as Allen Renear notes in a
article, the standard can “improve our ability to describe textual
features…. The TEI Guidelines represent an elucidation of
current practices, methods, and concepts that open the way to
new methods of analysis, new understandings, and new
possibilities for representation and communication” (235).
The TEI encoding project functions as a pedagogical tool to
study an Early Modern Spanish text; it helps students become
more knowledgeable regarding the primary text and the context
in which it was written. By using TEI students focus their
attention on three main levels: linguistic, geographical and
historical. While working directly with a text with the purpose
of encoding one of its portions, students have a chance to learn
across multiple disciplines, e.g. learning about the ancient
Spanish denomination of a place, and creating a link to its
location on a map of the times.
The encoding projects are divided into several stages. First,
students use text editing software to create a transcription from
digital images of original print editions – a process that involves
deciphering difficult 16th century typography and finding codes
to represent the many characters that are no longer used in
contemporary Spanish. After completing the transcription, the
students employ a rigorous, descriptive “tagging” process, using
the TEI XML encoding scheme. They begin by marking the
structural parts of the text – where each chapter begins and
ends, each section heading, each paragraph, and so on. They
then use TEI encoding to tag historical people names, places,
and unfamiliar or archaic vocabulary in the text. And as a final
stage of the project, the students perform appropriate research
about their texts, and using TEI, define all of the tagged people,
places, and vocabulary – essentially providing electronic
footnotes to the digital editions of the text. During this stage
of the project, students also work with scans of original maps
from the period – locating on the maps many places they have
tagged, and linking segments of text in their documents to the
scans.
This process presents many pedagogical advantages. Students
are extremely motivated by projects like this: they work so
closely with the text and end up creating their own annotated
edition, thus feeling a sense of ownership of the documents. Many students are excited that this project reaches beyond
typical Humanities class work and that they see the results of
their hard work very quickly published on the World Wide
Web. The students' digital editions of the texts also help
preserve and eventually widen the distribution of out of print
texts. And finally, this project introduces an academic rigor in
studying this literature, which shows in the accuracy taken to
encode and validate the text encoding. Within the last few years,
Wheaton has been instituting a new curriculum that emphasizes
that students should gain a breadth and depth of knowledge
through their course work. The process of creating a digital
edition of texts like these ensures that students have an in depth
experience with a text unlike most other experiences they have
had in the humanities. This approach to a text encourages them
to apply a systematic, almost scientific approach to humanities
scholarship. This work, therefore, is well in line with the goals
of many of digital humanities scholarship. A goal, which Susan
Hockey expressed in a comprehensive article about the history
of the Digital Humanities: “to bring the rigor and systematic
unambiguous procedural methodologies characteristic of the
sciences to address problems within the humanities that had
hitherto been most often treated in a serendipitous fashion” (3).
Our experience teaching with TEI at Wheaton has been very
positive: students learn to understand and appreciate the original
rare book, only once they have had their experience with
creating the digitally enhanced version of it. At that point
they’re ready to visit a prestigious library like the John Carter
Brown Library at Brown University, and look at the book and
at the maps of the period. Undergraduates benefit from the text
encoding experience in many ways: better understanding of the
topic of study, better understanding of the foreign language,
and interest, or at least curiosity, for the rare book itself.
Assessment on student learning has been very positive: students
retain a lot more than with traditional teaching, and can
sometimes also spot irregularities and even fake news in the
texts they study. The load on the faculty member and on the
library liaison is very high, but it pays off with the students’
satisfaction.
Bibliography
Anderson, Danny J., and Jill S. Kuhnheim. Cultural Studies in
the Curriculum: Teaching Latin America. New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 2003.
Burnard, Lou, and Syd Bauman, eds. TEI P5:Guidelines for
Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. TEI Consortium,
2006. <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei
-p5-doc/html/>
Burnard, Lou, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth,
eds. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 2006.
Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History : A
Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on
the Web. Philadlephia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2006.
Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Literary Text in the Digital Age.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Literary Text in the Digital Age.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Hockey, Susan. "The History of Humanities Computing." A
Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray
Siemens and John Unsworth. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, 2004. 3-19.
Kohut, Karl. "Fernández De Oviedo: Historiografía e
Ideología." Boletin de la Real Academia Española 73.259
(1993): 367-82.
Renear, Allen H. "Text Encoding." A Companion to Digital
Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John
Unsworth. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 218-239.
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and Lou Burnard, eds. P4:
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
Oxford, UK: TEI Consortium, 2002.
The Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia. The Etext
Center Introduction to TEI and Guide to Document Preparation.
. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/standards
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Women's Writer's Project. WWP Training Materials. . <http
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