¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 The title of this post might sound provocative or, maybe, ironic: on the contrary, my intention is totally different. Indeed, I consider the building of the digital project I am involved in (“Encoding as Close Reading”, proposed by Tom) as an amazing adventure, unpredictable but surely unforgettable,
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 If every digital project is a collaborative kind of work, I am pretty sure me and the other four members of our group (Gregory, Tom, Michael, and Brian) shared the same feelings during our first approach to the work: apprehension, and a little bit of worry. But I am also sure that everybody will do a great job to build our project, and that the final outcome will be really good.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 One of the first, and most relevant, decisions to take is about the definition of our roles. When I voted Tom’s project, I proposed myself as the Community manager: I considered this role as the one where I can bring some expertise to the crew. Anyway, Michael too proposed himself for this role, and so we decided to split our responsibilities: he will take care of the publicity of the project and front-end tasks, while my role will be more related to the building of a TEI community of potential users and to follow the development of TEI outreach and expertise. On this side, I need to acquire more expertise about the TEI encoding: for doing so, Tom has been very helpful in sending me and Michael some interesting links about the role of encoding to study literature, and also another – very precious – with the basic instructions to start to encode. Of course, I will need more practice about this, but I think that a good point will be – during our next meeting – to discuss how many different levels of divisions we want to apply as markers to our poems. TEI allows to encode poetry by metrical and rhytmical division, and also following the more classical schemes of quantity (as quartets or couplets). Not all the poems require the same tools: this decision is strictly related to the kind of poems we want for our prototype. Modern or ancient poems? In a classical or in a sperimental layout?
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 As for the community of potential users, I could take advantage of a project developed at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I got my Master: professor H. W. Storey built a team of humanists, digital humanists and computer scientists to create Petrarchive, a digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook. I was not directly involved in the encoding of Petrarch’s poems for the site, which followed very specific directions; nevertheless, I am still in contact with the people that worked on the project, and I think they could constitute a useful community of people to test our prototype as beta-users.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 This is how I would like to accomplish the responsibilities of my role. I will do my best to help the other members of the group to reach our goals and to build a really good project.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 So, let’s the adventure begins.