A Digital, Yellow Glow

I have become entranced by the “mighty yellow glow” of my TEI-based project - from beyond the screen it beckoned me into its strange, golden wild and I gladly obeyed (May 1936, 42). I’m talking, of course, about The Yellow Nineties Online. I knew, from out of the corner of my eye, that I had caught a faint glimpse of its yellow light before, but I was unsure as to where exactly I had encountered it. Upon further inspection of its luminous facets, I realised that a former professor of mine, the lovely Marjorie Stone, had pointed me in the direction of the scholarly work of one of its principle investigators, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, in the final year of my undergraduate studies.

According to its introduction, The Yellow Nineties Online “is an open-access electronic resource for the study of avant-garde aesthetic periodicals of the British fin de siècle” (Kooistra and Denissof 2011). More specifically, the project uses “the thirteen-volume Yellow Book (1894-1897) as [the] site’s central focus” because of the its historical significance to the period. The Yellow Book, far removed from the modern directory of the same name, was an innovative, clothbound periodical of the British 1890’s that encompassed both image and text, and ultimately came to be recognized as the “defining object for all that characterized the yellow nineties—from Aestheticism and Decadence to the rise of the “little magazine” to new notions of gender and sexuality.”

Source: http://www.1890s.ca/HTML.aspx?s=YBV9_all.html

This subject matter immediately appealed to me but, without knowing much about XML, I assumed that the project would keep its code to itself because I tend towards pessimism and sometimes have difficulty sharing. Much to my surprise, I found this project to be extremely transparent in regards to its process and its use of XML. The project’s rationale for marking up both its primary and secondary sources in XML using the TEI markup language focuses on the facilitation of the “complex searches these aesthetic objects demand” (“Editorial Principles”). In addition to explaining its use of XML and sharing its TEI markup with all users, The Yellow Nineties Online also publishes articles that detail the challenges its research team has encountered while encoding. There is a genuine honesty about these essays that I find incredibly endearing and relatable. In Constance Crompton’s essay, "I Still Prefer Books": Narrating the Gentle Introduction to XML Markup” she admits that, “[l]ike many coders, [she] learned how to encode in TEI before [she] learned the rationale and purpose of markup” (2010, 2). As someone who is trying to wrap her head around the same rationale, I thought this was a particularly refreshing confession.  

Crompton also discusses the changes to markup detail that the members of The Yellow Nineties Online had to come to terms with. Originally, the team had an extensively detailed system of tags in mind for their project. In attempts “to do justice to The Yellow Book’s semantic substance, [the team] tagged place names, geographic regions, dates, each character’s fictional status, quotation marks, and foreign words. [They] even imagined a second layer of coding for each document” (5). However, this intensely nuanced system of tags presented the team with an issue of accessibility. While these tags were beneficial for some scholars, they ultimately “decreased the utility of the site for users who wanted to access the full print run of The Yellow Book and the associated scholarly content” because of the time it took to write them (6). In response to this issue of accessibility, the team chose to scale back the detail of their tagging system, thus creating “a site that is useful to digital humanities experts as well as novices” (8). This honesty and dedication to accessibility reflects Julia Flanders’ assertion that digital humanists must be “committed to encoding … data in a standard way so that it can be shared” for years to come, perhaps making The Yellow Nineties Online an example of the “rare” kind of collaboration Flanders refers to (2012, 74). 

I am confident that this project’s “horizon of usefulness” will remain visible, fiercely emanating a digital, yellow glow for years to come.

Source: http://www.archive.org/stream/yellowapr189609uoft#page/n69/mode/2up

References

Crompton, Constance. 2010. "I Still Prefer Books": Narrating the Gentle Introduction to XML Markup." The Yellow Nineties Online. Accessed October 11, 2016. http://www.1890s.ca/HTML.aspx?s=Prefer_Books.html.

Flanders, Julia. 2012. “Collaboration and Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for Digital Humanities.” In Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty, 68-80. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen and Dennis Denisoff. 2011. “Welcome to The Yellow Nineties Online.” The Yellow Nineties Online. Accessed October 11, 2016. http://www.1890s.ca/Default.aspx.

           

              “Editorial Principles.” The Yellow Nineties Online. Accessed October 11, 2016. http://www.1890s.ca/Editorial_Principles.aspx. 

May, John Lewis. 1936. John Lane and the Nineties. London: John Lane The Bodley Head.