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Teaching Text Encoding in the Madre María de San José (México 1656–1719) Digital Project
University of Alabama
University of Alabama
Southern Methodist University
THE ALABAMA DIGITAL HUMANITIES CENTER, part of the University Libraries and located in the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the heart of the University of Alabama campus, has played a prominent role in fostering both research and teaching using digital humanities. In the fall of both 2015 and 2016, Dr. Emma Wilson, Mary Alexander, and Dr. Connie Janiga-Perkins partnered to team teach the graduate course Readings in Women’s Spiritual Autobiography: Language, Materiality, and Identity in Colonial Spanish American Texts using Digital Humanities.
The team-taught course was composed of four four-week segments that introduced students to the traditional literary research and paleography skills necessary to work with historic manuscripts and then to the thoroughly modern process of using text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to translate student transcription and research into a digital edition of part of one of the texts they studied. The first segment consisted of an extensive study of history, literary criticism, and bibliography of and primary sources by women authors of the Spanish American colonial period and focused on the spiritual autobiographies of two Spanish American nuns. The first, Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (b. 1669), was a black-veiled sister in the Order of Poor Clares in Bogotá (Colombia). She resided in the Convent of Santa Clara her entire professed life until her death in 1727. María de San José (b. 1656, d. 1719) was an Augustinian Recollect nun from New Spain (México), who professed at the Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla and later founded the Convent of Soledad in Oaxaca.
Women such as María and Jerónima were taught that they were inferior in every way to men. From this early training as well as from other cultural and societal messages throughout their lives, women internalized a deep sense of inferiority, a belief that they were more given to emotion than logic, more deceptive than men, more capable of morally questionable behavior, and, therefore, in need of a stern, guiding (male) hand. Early in life that guidance was provided by the father of the family, or another strong male figure such as a grandfather or uncle. In adulthood, the honorable options for these (upper-class) women were marriage, the convent, and in some rare cases spinsterhood under the protection of a brother or another male family member.
María de San José and Jerónima Nava y Saavedra chose the convent, where they confronted not only a strong system of female authority but the “heavy male hand” of their confessors and the church hierarchy. Their autobiographical accounts portray their lives, both spiritual and worldly, and show the maturing of their agency despite often-harsh treatment by their confessors. The survival of these women’s writing depended exclusively on the male authority exercised within the colonial church. Since few authenticated manuscripts of this type survive from the colonial era, it is especially important to create new opportunities for both their preservation and their dissemination.
The second segment concentrated on the art and theory of critical editing, with in-depth rereading of the primary sources from what Stuart Hall calls negotiated positioning.1 Emphasis was placed on readings by Peter Shillingburg, Leah Marcus, David Greetham, Leroy Searle, John Lennard, and Zachary Lesser. Segment three consisted of a study of basic paleography and transcription techniques appropriate for women’s writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spanish America. After a bit of practice, the project began. The classes transcribed unpublished portions of The Life Story of María de San José. We are grateful to the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, for the 1,200-page manuscript.
In the fourth and final segment of the courses, the class moved to the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, where Mary Alexander and Dr. Emma Wilson taught the students text encoding and how to make a digital edition. (See fig. 4.1.)
Figure 4.1. Manuscript page from Maria de San Jose Oaxaca Manuscript 87R.
ENCODING A DIGITAL EDITION
The Environment
The Alabama Digital Humanities Center provided tools needed to encode a digital edition. The Macs had oXygen, an extensible markup language (XML) editor, installed on them. Big screens displayed slides and oXygen’s screen. A whiteboard was used to record discussion points. This facility provided an ideal group learning environment.
The Team
The students were divided into groups of twos or threes. They would switch roles of encoder and proofreader. Mary Alexander led the instruction in using oXygen as an encoder and in the metadata principles governing TEI; Connie Janiga-Perkins led the literary research questions and conundrums presented by transcribing and encoding the text, specifically with regard to making the transition between the manuscript itself and a digital version; and Emma Annette Wilson mediated the discussions, asking questions about the links between the choices being made within the encoding, the transcription, and the original manuscript itself and extrapolating broader principles of digital scholarship at work within the scenario.
Teaching TEI
The TEI’s customized schema, TEI Lite, was the best fit for the project with its set of basic elements for encoding a digital edition, a strong community of members, and its tools to support the creation of digital editions. Students were instructed to open an oXygen TEI P5 Lite template that provided the root element, list of namespaces, TEI header, and body sections in a valid TEI document. After discussion on the purpose of the namespaces, we started immediately encoding the text body. TEI header work was scheduled for the last class.
The students were instructed to paste the transcription in between the opening and closing tags of the paragraph element. A lesson on the importance of opening and closing tags in a well-formed document included information about the XML, an independent language used to store and transport data, the foundation of TEI’s syntax. The line