Central issues of humanities computing: understanding the intersection between technology and humanistic/cultural research

Important to present this not as a simple act of copying, making a digital facsimile: instead, think of it as part of the intellectual strategy of research creating research objects that are of value: whether broad or specific, advanced or basic

Text encoding fits into this as the chief means of creating textual representations: reseach objects which are of interest because of their textual information not simply the letters and words themselves, but also the text’s structure and its contents text encoding allows the researcher to represent the text in complex ways and allows the addition of specialized research knowledge as well as basic information necessary to elucidate arcane texts.

So when teaching text encoding, the first thing to do is to be sure your audience understands this, and three things in particular: that text encoding creates a model of the text: a representation that will be used for research purposes that text encoding is a strategic act: it exists to serve the specific purposes of its user. It is not a neutral or objective process that text encoding therefore is discipline-specific: it adds certain kinds of information and focuses attention on certain kinds of information, and it ignores and eliminates other kinds of information.

These considerations make text encoding more difficult, but also more interesting, both to learn and to perform.

More difficult: because it involves complex analysis and decision-making because it involves specialized knowledge of the research objects and the audience

More interesting: because its work is directly implicated in the scholarly research that will be performed on the text and in fact is in some ways inseparable from it.

Thus when we teach text encoding, we are also teaching (at a high level of abstraction) an intellectual process one that resembles consulting: as a teacher, one is not the scholar, but one has to work with the scholar and help the scholar achieve his or her research aims a process for making decisions about how to represent the text a process for anticipating how the various parts of the representation will work together: for instance, if we know that we will be representing historical place names as part of our encoding, we can also anticipate that we may need to link those place names to specific geographical locations, which in turn will require that we regularize the names and provide information about their relationships (what places are parts of what other places)

This is a test of a lectureNote in a different section. ERASE ME.