During my time at UMD, I have been engaged in a constant battle to find a quiet place to study during those periods of time between work and class. I started out in the graduate study room in McKeldin Library, but it was not long before hoards of students began choosing that place to study as well. Now, I’m relatively good at tuning out certain noises. However, when people are talking to one another, I find it incredibly difficult not to eavesdrop. I get drawn in, more intent on listening to what is being said than on reading an article for class. In any case, it was not long before I had to move. Occasionally I could find a quiet spot elsewhere in the library, but more often than not, the constant traffic and conversations of passerby broke my concentration. So, I started studying in the English Graduate Lounge in Tawes. Similar problems occurred, though there was a fair share of quiet times, and I still go there on occasion. But right down the hall, I found a relatively quiet corner (unless TA’s were having conferences). I began going there on occasion in order to get both quiet (for the most part) and privacy (you can hide quite well behind the one wall, leaving only your feet and legs visible to people in the hallway). In any case, I was content.

Eventually, I started to notice writing on the wall.

First, this appeared:

After a quick Google search, I found out that these two lines are lyrics from a song entitled “The Last Lost Continent” by La Dispute. The song can be found here.

Another day, I found this:

These lines are lyrics from a song entitled “Tilde” by the band Touché Amore.

And later, I discovered these:

These lines are also from a La Dispute song entitled “Nine.”

These words, though communicating a familiar sentiment—summer love, did not bring up any definitive results on Google. Perhaps the inscriber decided to try his or her hand at composing lines.

Some of the handwriting looks similar and the fact that two of the lines come from La Dispute and three of the four are song lyrics seems to indicate that it may be the work of the same person, though I never discovered who the other person or persons were who also found that spot a good place to study or take a break. Perhaps it was just a student who would often meet with one of the TA’s in a nearby office, or maybe it was a TA seeking a bit of distance from his/her other office mates. In any case, it was interesting for me to read these little lines inscribed on the wall by a stranger who had perhaps found the same semi-quiet privacy that made the corner such a good place for me to go and study between work and class. By leaving my own kind of writing on the wall through my QR code that links to this blog post, I will make my own mark, continuing the story of that corner of Tawes.

I decided to visit Walt Whitman’s birthplace, located in Huntington Station, NY, for several reasons. I’ve been meaning to visit the house for a long time, even though it lies only 10 or so miles from my parents’ house. I also attempted to teach a few Whitman poems earlier this semester. In the past I would drive by the site all the time, frequent the nearby Walt Whitman Mall, and was aware of Long Islanders’ pride in their favorite poet’s origins. I suppose next I’m supposed to visit the home of Billy Joel, from a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island.

I took a tour of the grounds and the house itself, where Walt Whitman Sr. practiced carpentry. I walked through the parlor, kitchen, master bedroom, spare bedroom, and servant’s quarters. As you can imagine, everything looks very old, and it would have been quite easy to hit my head on the low ceiling going up the steps. The Whitmans owned a host of useful tools that are no longer necessary anymore, such as a giant loom, bed rope stretcher stick (can’t remember what it is actually called, but apparently this is where the saying “sleep tight” comes from), and even a hoop and stick.

My visit to Walt Whitman’s birthplace was quite enjoyable. Many thanks to my father for joining me on his busy Sunday afternoon.

Note: I could not secure a more significant spot to place the QR Code, such as the statue, the house, ect., as I was being watched by the tour guide and did not want to get kicked out for vandalism. So the grass would have to do. For some reason the picture does not work when I try to scan it with my phone (bad resolution?), so I also included the original code file.

I had a bit of trouble at first in selecting a place to vandalize with which to interact.  The locations to which I have strong connections are for the most part 1) In a different state, 2) On campus, or 3) My apartment.  A lengthy road trip was out of the question, the Tawes building (for all its charms) lacks a certain something, and the only evidence for other people interacting with my apartment was the vehicle registration card that was left here by a previous tenant and which I, sadly, threw away when I found it on the top shelf in the kitchen.  As I contemplated these considerations, I determined that it would be quite absurd if — here of all places — I couldn’t think of a sufficiently memorialized spot.  However, I also did not want to get arrested.  Thus I settled on a location of moderate fame:  the George Mason Memorial.  I discovered it by walking into it during a ramble around the tidal basin last year; I feel rather fondly toward it, mostly because it seems so easy to neglect or to pass by.

This is supposed to be a fountain in front of the memorial, but it has no water.  I think it looks like a great spot for some theatre-in-the-round.

Instead of a traditional blog post, I put a monologue in my QR code.  I wanted to do something respectful (since this is, after all, very public property with which to attempt interaction), brief, and that didn’t immediately indicate my real name.  I made a minute-long movie using xtranormal, for which I selected an animated character who could (with some generosity of the imagination) represent me.  The link to which I attached my QR code sends the viewer to my video as published on YouTube, here:  http://youtu.be/ARsatTfZEvY.  The video can also be played on xtranormal.com here:  http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/14303672/why-i-love-the-george-mason-memorial , but I thought it best to use the YouTube link since more people are likely to be familiar with it and to have phone apps for it.  The movie itself is a little excessively cheerful, but I hoped that this might serve as a defense against the potential annoyance of serious-minded visitors to the memorial!

(I took some pictures and tried to look like an innocent tourist while I was waiting for my opportunity to pounce with tape.)

The statue of Mr. Mason was created by sculptor Wendy Ross.  More info about her work (including the memorial) can be found at her website, here:  http://www.rosssculpturestudio.com/.  I taped my code to the back of one of the pillars.  The way you see it is by sitting on the bench with George and sidling all the way back so that you are leaning on the back of the bench and (unless you are, like him, nine feet tall) your feet are dangling merrily straight out in front of you in the posture of a five-year-old on any adult’s furniture.  Judging by the number of people I saw climb up there while I was waiting for a witness-free moment to do the deed, I’m not the only one to feel that this is a desirable spot in which to sit (though few may scoot far enough back to spot my code).

These two photos were taken from the same spot; looking to the right, one sees my code on a pillar; turning to the left, one sees George.

After I finished (and ascertained that I had avoided arrest), I paid a visit to my other favorite statue in D.C. and bought a Rosie the Riveter lunchbox.  All in all, not a bad day!

After my first idea for this exercise went bust, I began ruminating on alternative sites in my Delaware hometown to photograph. I trolled around the town’s website to see if anything popped up (these sorts of things recede into the background of everyday existence, don’t they?), and lo and behold, I had passed the perfect place on my way to photograph my failed first attempt! Presenting… The Historic Ross Mansion!

I passed by this property every day my senior year of high school – it lies on a back way into town, right across from a set of railroad tracks that are still used daily by trains bearing coal and grain to power plants and mills throughout Sussex County. On clear nights at my parents’ house I can hear the eerie sound of a midnight train whistle across the mile or so expanse – my high school best friend lives right next to the tracks, and I’ve always wondered how she sleeps through it each night.

As you can read on the historic marker above, the Ross Mansion (nobody includes “Governor”) dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, its architecture clearly revealing its Victorian origins. The sign, a historic artifact in itself, fails to include reference to the two newest additions to the property – a slave quarters discovered in the early nineties and a honeymoon cottage/gatehouse.

I dug around a little and found this University of Delaware article from 1992 about the discovery of the Ross Mansion slave quarters. I remember hearing the story from my parents (though I must have been only 5 or so), about how they found this building in the backwoods of the Ross Mansion property and discovered what it truly was. At the time it was the only known slave quarters in the entire state. Now it has been restored and relocated to a new location right behind the mansion.

A little while after the addition of the slave quarters to the grounds, this little structure appeared at the entrance of the property. My parents both told me that this was another woods find, a honeymoon cottage discovered in the foresty depths of the land; however, when I sought to verify their story, I uncovered two others! Multiple sites refer to the structure as a “gatehouse” – possibly referring to its current function (?), while others corroborate the honeymoon cottage designation, although origination stories differ here: some sources (like the county realtor’s association) say that the cottage was built for the Governor’s son, whereas the historical society, which manages the property, says on their site: “Explore a ‘Honeymoon Cottage’ bought from a catalog and located on the property.” Now, I have no idea what that even means, and it just sounds ridiculous, so despite their prestigious title, I’m choosing to ignore such claims. You can decide for yourselves – mail-order or vintage handmade?

Many non-historic buildings have begun to surround the Ross Mansion property in recent years – most prominently the newly relocated local library and a sports complex. What’s interesting, though, is the fact that the city council mandated that the architecture of both sites must reflect the grand old mistress of the adjoining property (i.e. the Mansion). See for yourself:

Above center is the southwest side of the mansion, above left shows the arched windows of the library, while above right is a pressbox with exposed support beams. My dad pointed all of this out to me – I was totally unaware of how the “story” of the architecture of the Ross Mansion had spread to other surrounding facades. And still, the story of the Ross Mansion property is not limited to local lore (where did that cottage come from??) or architectural style – it’s still being unfolded, actually. In the annual Easter egg hunt, the Town and Country Fairs (complete with fireworks, craft stalls, and a full-blown reenactment with cannons – pardon the pun), and the occasional professional engagement photo shoot performed by a boy-now-man that I used to HATE sitting next to in fifth grade, the story of Ross Mansion is one that’s still being told in many voices.

Special thanks to my dad for driving & sharing his own stories. And Sadie, for moral support.

I had a blast encoding JB/107/110/02, a sheet of paper divided into four columns of fairly readable handwriting that described a series of recipes. While finding a document that had not yet been transcribed was a fairly long and frustrating process, the actual encoding was quite fun once I established a rhythm. The tutorials and tool bars don’t mire the user in the details of the markup language, but enable the transcriber to figure it out as they go. The ability to see and edit changes quickly allowed for somewhat low-stakes trial and error learning.

This exercise reminded me a lot of my high school programming class. It was lovely to be able to “deform” the text of the document and experiment with the logic of the language. There is also something perversely satisfying to me about writing detailed comments explaining my choices. It’s like writing notes in the margin of a library book–someone else is going to see them.

By the end of the exercise I was able to recognize semantic chunks of markup and get a feel for its rules. However the document itself provided some interesting challenges because of how the page is arranged. Here are a few of my favorite examples.

There were many places, like this one, in which a small horizontal line divided the ingredients from the “Labour” of the recipe. There were also a ton of numbers, fractions, and what I took to be the small letter ‘d’ to one side of the words. Sometimes these numbers were accompanied by units of measurement, sometimes not. While this 1/2 over 2 1/2 first appeared to me to be a complex fraction, I realized that it was a break in the page that there was no accurate way to represent. First I had to figure out how to represent fractions [put the numerator in superscript, then / and the denominator]. Then I had to mess around until I realized that no matter what I couldn’t quite format it to look like the page itself. Some fun things happened.

First this, my attempt to underline superscript. [It's wrong, there's too many </hi>'s, but I got it to work eventually. Just using superscript and / looks much prettier than trying to underline it.]

Then this blue box showed up around my fraction! Don’t know what it meant, but I got it to go away.

Because the page was divided into narrow columns of script, I managed to reproduce the text but could not represent the vertical lines that separate it out. That kind of page division is accomplished by a page break, according to the transcription guidelines, so I felt compelled to specify in my comments whether it was a horizontal or vertical page break. For documents like this it would be useful to be able to insert some kind of simplified graphic representation of say, a vertical line, in order to get a sense of the space of the page itself.

I enjoyed encoding the recipes because I got to encounter a particularly everyday document. The list-like nature of it means that punctuation and abbreviation are not always standardized, yet we could ostensibly still follow the recipe today. It felt downright practical, allowing me to get a snapshot of how people were planning and preparing meals. Furthermore, seeing different versions of the text in multiples windows allows for a poetic kind of reading, as certain words could be juxtaposed or read as single phrases, i.e. “spice & labour.”**

**When I put this phrase into the title for this post, WordPress automatically changed it to “Spice &amp; Labour.” Fun.

Ladies and gentlemen, I encoded something!  This something, in fact: http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/index.php?title=JB/116/650/039&oldid=60018

Before I began this assignment, I anticipated that “encoding” would be an activity of saddening difficulty, but the actual process was not at all what I thought it would be.  The word “code” conjured up mental images of those mysterious black boxes (the kind that People Who Know What They Are Doing are wont to use) that contain endless tumbling cataracts of magical white text that could, most probably, break the world if improperly fiddled with.  However, the Transcribe Bentham project’s toolbar was very easy to use and I appreciated the beginners-welcome tone of the introductory materials.  The following sentence (from the Transcription Guidelines page) is quite possibly the most comforting thing I have encountered since embarking on Mission Digital Humanities:  “Some of this may seem daunting, but do not be afraid of having a go at transcription – it is impossible to break anything, and any errors you might make can easily be reverted.”

I love looking at old handwriting, but I think I’m on the same page as Dan when it comes to deciphering what it actually says.  I opted to start with a printed page so I could focus on the encoding.  After that went as well as it did, I turned to a handwritten page.  I decided to set that aside for now because I was having difficulty increasing the zoom to a comfortable level on the screen of my relatively small laptop.  I plan to continue working on it, but I intend to do it from the large screen of a Mac in the library.  Because my interests lie in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, I was delighted to find that Transcribe Bentham offers links to paleography resources.  I was not expecting to stumble into paleography as a result of DH homework!  This has been my favorite assignment so far!

Transcribe Bentham was not my first experience with either the transcription process or XML. In Neil Friastaist’s Technoromanticism course, half of us were given pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript to encode and engage with as we tried to sort through her handwriting, Percy Shelley’s handwriting, her curious doodling habits, and the actual textual revisions that Frankenstein underwent during its composition. The easy part of that particular project, however, was that we already had a transcription to work from when we did our own encoding. Transcribe Bentham placed more responsibility on me to play a part in the deciphering, not simply the encoding or double-checking, of a manuscript. So while the XML encoding was not new to me, the transcription process of reading and attempting to accurately represent what Bentham was writing (sloppily) was up to me almost entirely.

My passage of choice was the beginning of a section titled Composition, where Bentham writes on what he believe the duties of the Courts over their procedures. In several cases, context was key to correctly transcribing a word (no shock there), and so was returning after some time away in order to reread and discover whether or not I had any more ideas about what a particular piece of writing was saying. But of more interest to me, was when I found a word that I could not easily discard what I thought I was reading, despite it not making sense. To clarify, this is the image I refer to:

What does that look like to you? To me, it looks like ‘websites’ and that is how I initially read it until a nanosecond later when I realized they didn’t have websites in the 18th and 19th centuries. But this realization started me thinking about time and culture and how that can affect an interpretive process like transcription. While my example is extreme, and was quickly realized and dismissed as impossible, more subtle examples like this could occur with anachronisms and especially slang, idioms, and euphemisms. This is something that affects the transcription process I’m sure, and would be interested in seeing (if I can given my limited knowledge about Jeremy Bentham) whether or not this sort of thing has occurred and is much more difficult to pick up on because of our distance from the time period and (my personal) lack of colloquial knowledge from Bentham’s era.

When I first glanced at the exercise for today, I wasn’t sure exactly what transcribing would entail. The tutorial videos were very informative, and the first video made the process seem relatively easy. But when I watched the second video, I thought, “I have to ENCODE this, too?” Typing words is easy. Encoding, to me, has always seemed like writing in an entirely new language.

However, I am very into toolbars. (I mean that). As such, I thought the encoding process of transcribing Bentham was totally doable, even on my first try! I typed the line breaks since they were so numerous, and made one typo ( <lb> instead of <lb/> ) at one point, but I caught myself when I viewed the preview. Other than that, the toolbar was incredibly easy to navigate, especially because I had a very simple page sequence with very few “additions,” no “strikethroughs,” and NO unusual spellings, illegible words or questionable words on my end!

Seriously, I have seen some of the words my classmates are dealing with and I’m not sure how I ended up with JB/002/312/001, which appears to have the most pristine cursive handwriting I’ve ever seen. I went to the “un-transcribed” links and this was the first folio I tried! But enough gloating about my beginner’s luck. I enjoyed the encoding experience, not because it forced me to try something I thought would leave me befuddled (and it didn’t) but because it forced (literal) close reading. Zoomed in, read-each-word close reading. With such diligent attention to words (and punctuation! oh, the punctuation) one can’t help but consider the choices the writer made as he or she composed the text. I’d imagine that transcribing and encoding poetry is especially illuminating in this way, as each line break and em-dash is noted in code. None of these are particularly new or astute observations, but it was, of course, fruitful to experience them first hand.

Happy snowquester, everyone!

As my classmates, I found it very hard to read the manuscript. I also had the feeling it was not going to be that hard: as a teacher I am very used to the most bizarre handwritings, but this was a puzzle for me. Second, as not being native English, it was more difficult to guess! Sometimes I did not know if the phrase or word I was reading belonged to the time Bentham wrote or it was more modern. The same with old words that I never heard of before. I searched on dictionaries, texts by Benham, I opened other folios. I do not know if I am the right person to work with an archive in a language other than the ones I know well! But sometimes it could be productive, as a foreign view is always interesting and helpful.

There were moments that I did not understand what I was transcribing as a text: I had just words with a minimum of cohesion and coherence. I had a feeling of complete fragmentation! I think that the exercise was good to see how fragmented digital texts are, how we face fragmentation everywhere working in DH. We were working with just a tiny part of the gigantic Bentham’s work, and in my case, knowing just what Foucault said about panopticons and nothing else. The good is that now I know a lot more about Bentham, his life and his work.

I must admit that I liked it a lot transcribing and encoding. When I began transcribing I found the tool bar very easy to use! But it was not so easy for me to find a folio to transcribe, I selected this one using the random option and it turned out to be easy level. But I had problems to read three little words, even though I spent many days trying to figure them out.
I received an answer, and it was accepted! I was surprised to know that the transcript was right! I just missed a few words (mainly because of the crossing outs), but the rest was ok. I received a text saying that it was “far from the easiest manuscript to transcribe, so this is a great effort!”

I found it very interesting having been part of a project that thinks of the importance of preservation (and I agree with Mary’s words), and in which many people are involved (volunteer transcribers, historians, editors, digital humanists, etc.) I liked the idea I was helping to the project, creating something new, doing, building.