Emily Dickinson's Archive

It was difficult for me to choose a digitization project that uses TEI – there are so many diverse projects with interesting subject matter. However, I chose to examine the Emily Dickinson Archive because my group and I are encoding several of her envelope poems for the encoding challenge and I wanted to delve into Dickinson’s larger works. I was unaware there was an existing encoding initiative for Dickinson’s work and I was interested to see the encoding choices the Archive made.

The Emily Dickinson Archive is an “open access” resource that includes all of her manuscripts, ranging from drafts to finished poems. The website displays images of the poems, along with “transcriptions” from multiple editions (“Emily Dickinson Archive”). The Archive plans to expand the Dickinson collection in the future, such as including images of Dickinson’s letters (“Overview”). The project is described as a starting point for “scholarship to be produced, rather than being viewed as “a work of scholarship itself” (“Overview”).

One of the inspirations for the Emily Dickinson Archive was that Dickinson’s manuscripts are very old and delicate, so there is limited access to handling or viewing the materials (“Emily Dickinson Archive”). This initiative allows students, readers, scholars, etc, to have access to Dickinson’s work without being constrained by the limits of physical access. The website allows the user to zoom in/out and search the poem. The benefit of having an image of the poem gives the user the opportunity to understand the physical attributes of the text without actually holding it, such as her handwriting, the details of the ink, the paper she chose to write on, etc. Another inspiration for creating the Emily Dickinson Archive was to compile all of her texts in one space. Harvard University started this digitization project, but several educational institutions and libraries contributed material, such as the New York Public Library and the Yale University Library (“Emily Dickinson Archive”). The physical texts are spread geographically so an individual can not view multiple texts from different locations simultaneously. The digital archive gives users the opportunity to view multiple texts “donated” from multiple institutions.

Source: Screen Shot of "Houghton Library - (142a) If I may have it, when it's dead, J577, Fr431, http://www.edickinson.org/editions/2/image_sets/74978#search-panel=1&work-panel=0

I was very surprised that The Emily Dickinson Archive provided the extent of the TEI information that they did. On the website’s “About” page, it discusses how the project uses TEI XML to encode her manuscripts and also provides a link to the TEI website. The archive hosts multiple editions and has encoded each of them separately (“About”). Users can download the text as TEI which shows the encoded text and credits (“How to Use”). I thought this was really beneficial because the user can view how the text was encoded and how different elements were tagged. However, if the user utilizes the TEI produced by the Archive, they need to display text attribution that complies with the Creative Commons license for the website (which is further outlined under their Terms of Use section) (“How to Use”).

In “Collaboration and Dissent” by Julia Flanders (2012), she discusses how standard encoding language is key for collaboration between two co-workers, organizations, people in different geographical locations and even through time (p. 73). Considering Dickinson’s texts have been contributed to the Archive from multiple institutions spanning several geographical locations, TEI assists in making documents easily shareable to any of the involved parties. Since this is such a large collection of works, I assume multiple people collaborated to make this Archive possible and having a standard would have made this process more fluid.

One of the challenges the Archive found was attempting to capture the different revisions Dickinson made to her manuscripts (“Emily Dickinson Archive”). “Textual Scholarship and Textual Encoding” by Elena Pierazzo (2016) says that TEI enables users to better describe textual features (p. 308). I think this is an interesting point because the TEI can highlight textual elements that might have not been apparent at a first glance.

Pierazzo (2016) also discusses how TEI allows the text to “go beyond what print can afford” (p. 311). I think this is particularly true because all of her texts have been consolidated to one online resource despite the physical copies being scattered throughout libraries and institutions (“The Emily Dickinson Archive”). Printed documents also have the ability to appear in one place, but in this instance, the TEI gives readers the ability to enjoy all of Dickinson’s writing from any technological device in any geographical location.  

References

“About.” Emily Dickinson Archive. Accessed October 12, 2016. http://www.edickinson.org/about

“Emily Dickinson Archive.” Text Encoding Initiative. Accessed October 12, 2016. http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/em01.xml

Flanders, Julia. "Collaboration and Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for Digital Huma nities." In Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

“How to Use.” Text Encoding Initiative. Accessed October 12, 2016. http://www.edickinson.org/use

“Overview.” Emily Dickinson Archive. Accessed October 12, 2016. http://www.edickinson.org/about

Pierazzo, Elena. "Textual Scholarship and Text Encoding." In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2016.