The encoding project finished, let me first say: I greatly enjoyed the experience.  When we were first introduced to encoding in class during boot camp, the experience was rather intimidating.  I had prior experience with programming, but creating a program is different from describing through code.  However, it did at least give me an advantage of knowing that all tags once opened (like <line>) needs to be closed (with a </line>).  But, as with most things, what one already is familiar with may make things easier, nevertheless it is the differences one must learn makes a project exciting.

While intimidating, learning to describe the manuscript pages in code made them personal.  My chief source of delight was also my greatest challenge when it came to encoding:  Mary and Percy’s illustrations and flirtations in the manuscript.  I’ve discussed this in my submission to the group post so I don’t want to discuss the technical aspects of this, but rather the reason why it deserves to be encoding.  It humanizes them.  One has a tendency of thinking of great and famous writers as something unlike us—not monstrous, but at least a sort of other.  No matter how human we know them to be, how much they celebrate that themselves, they still feel distant.

In one moment, looking at the tiny sketch of flowers in the margin of the text, one suddenly relates to these long dead writers.  We form a connection because of the sheer humanness of these little marginalia.  Percy and Mary have become people who, perhaps in a moment of boredom or when searching for inspiration, begin to draw doodles of nature in the corners.  And Percy, who writes at the end of the page, “O you pretty Pecksie!”, we are reminded is a husband—one who flirts with his wife while editing her manuscript!

But why is this important?  Maybe it isn’t and maybe one just records it because it is there, yet I disagree.  I think it’s important because it stops us and reminds us to be moved by what we read.  It reminds us—here, I think of our discussion in class—that these distant authors are not others, but us.   WE can relate to them as much as we relate to their writing.  They too fully experienced and understood the human.  That I think is very important and that is why even those details, unimportant to the text, are still important.