TEI in the Wild

For this week's post, I have (predictably) selected a project that incorporates digital mapping and GIS with text encoding and markup. I was initially drawn to this application out of curiousity; how has GIS technology with its rigid technical standards been incorporated with digital humanities and the TEI guidelines?

The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) attempts to "map the spatial imaginary of Shakespeare's city" and to provide "a virtual space for exploring the meaning and representation of cultural space in the London of Shakespeare and his contemporaries" (Jenstad, n.d.). The project attempts to fulfill this mission through four separate, fully interoperable applications:

• An Encyclopedia, including a Placeography, Gazetteer, Personography, and Orgography;
  
  
  
       http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index.htm
• A Library of primary source texts;
  
  
  
       http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index.htm
• A versioned edition of John Stow's 1598 A Survey of London; and
  
  
  
      http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index.htm
• A digital edition of the 1561 Agas woodcut map of London, provided as an interactive tool for discovering, querying and visualizing the information that populates the MoEML's databases.
  
  
  
  http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm

The application is rich with features and there are numerous avenues to explore - it's definitely worth a visit: https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index.htm.

Functionality and user experience aside, what I'd really like to focus on here is the project's mission and principles. The MoEML is a TEI project, with all documents encoded according to TEI Guidelines and validated against the TEI schema. Content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and the project is committed to being open-access, open-source, and open-code. Basically, this means that anyone is free to download, re-use, and/or re-purpose the MoEML's markup and content, provided that full attribution is given to the MoEML team (Jenstad, n.d.).

As if this isn't remarkable enough, the team has further demonstrated its commitment to accessibility and accountability in numerous other ways. Project code is available in GitHub.  Internal documentation providing detailed procedures and rationale for encoding practices is openly published. XML markup is available for every page via a prominent 'See XML' menu, which includes options for viewing a number of XML versions. In providing a rationale for provision of more than one XML version, aside from a desire for digital curation and interoperability, the programmer states that "we would also like our files to be used by as many other scholars as possible" (Holmes, n.d.). 

While these efforts to share work with other scholars of early modern London are admirable, even more impressive are the efforts put in to assisting the TEI community at large. Development is underway for a custom tool that will allow users to compare editorial interventions between editions of primary texts. TEI elements, attributes, and values are searchable via a custom CodeSharing Service that allows the user to locate examples of TEI tagsets. Described as a tool "that could well make your encoding life easier" (Jenstad, McLean-Fiander, Takeda, Butt, & Tanigawa, n.d.), its launch is yet another example of the MoEML's impressive contributions to textual scholarship and markup.

Before coming across this project, I was fully expecting to find an example that provided little to no insight into its encoding practices. Instead, I found the opposite. The MoEML has thrown its virtual doors open - WIDE open - and I couldn't help but ask: why? It likely helps that the lead programmer is also a member of the TEI Technical Council and thus works to advance the TEI's goal of cultivating a thriving research community. However, there seems to be more here - certainly a passion for the project as well as for the fields of digital humanities and text encoding in a larger sense. Whatever the underlying motivation, I can only imagine that Pierazzo and Flanders would both consider the MoEML to be moving in the right direction. The interdisciplinary collaboration required for a project of this nature is evident in its output. The open invitation for scholarly contribution and collaboration fosters an environment where "dissensus" (Flanders, 2012, p. 71) is clearly valued as an integral part  of the development process. In fact, project staff are encouraged to "take responsibility for identifying gaps between how things are and how they could be" so that they may then "work together to realize the possibilities we envision" (Jenstad, n.d.).

The efforts put in to ensuring that encoding practices and rationale are made "explicit and accountable" (Pierazzo, 2016, p. 319) not only serves to foster direct and indirect collaboration, but also the more difficult longitudinal collaboration referenced by Flanders, who poses the question of "what needs to be expressed in order for this kind of longitudinal collaboration - one in which the first collaborator has to play their full hand before the other even comes into the game - to work?" (2012, p. 79). Although some of the MoEML's methodologies may be experimental, it is exactly the sort of work that needs to be done to begin forming an answer to this question. I'd say they've played their full hand and then some.

References

Flanders, J. (2012). "Collaboration and Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for Digital       Humanities." In M. Deegan & W. McCarty (Eds.), Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

Holmes, M. (n.d.). "XML Outputs." In J. Jenstad (Ed.), The Map of Early Modern London. Retrieved October 8, 2016 from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml_outputs.htm.

Jenstad, J. (n.d.). "Mission Statement." The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jesntad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed October 8, 2016 from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/mission_statement.htm.

Jenstad, J., K. McLean-Fiander, J. Takeda, C. Butt, & K. Tanigawa. (n.d.). News Briefs. In J. Jenstad (Ed.), The Map of Early Modern London. Retrieved October 11, 2016 from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/news.htm.

Pierazzo, E. (2016). "Textual Scholarship and Text Encoding." In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2016.