at the beginning of each prose line to mark a boundary point separating sections of text. Students were introduced to an XML syntax called milestones in TEI. oXygen’s abilities as an XML editor with its internal support for TEI was demonstrated as it automatically provided a closing tag before students could finish typing the complete tag.
The groups of students were assigned pages of the diary to encode. Elements were needed for diacritics, strikethroughs, and superscripts to indicate abbreviations in the manuscript. Students learned about the UTF-8 character set. When a character with a diacritic was not supported by this character set, it would need additional inquiry for identification. Beginning with this unidentified character, a list of characters with unresolved encodings was compiled for future reference. Meanwhile, the class progressed from simple encodings to complex nested elements and elements with attributes. These gave the students opportunities to learn correct syntax for sustaining a well-formed and valid document.
The class discussions centered on possible encodings. Some thought that an element should be used to emphasize strikethroughs with thick dark markings, to indicate text being emphatically crossed out. The discussion on bold strikethroughs segued into a discussion about the meaning of diplomatic edition, an encoded text that is a literal transcription of the original document, including its physical structure and its variations. In this way, the digital teaching approach illuminated traditional editorial debates, bringing them to life afresh for a modern student group.
Within the manuscript, marginalia included words in the left margin, Arabic number with an alpha character in the right margin, and a drawing of a cross in the center. All were encoded to represent the original text layout. The words in the left margin were encoded as a segment as it was decided earlier that the document did not have text divisions. The cross required a glyph element to contain the URL to the cross’s image. The students decided to use the glyph’s subelement, desc (description) in which they supplied the basic description, “Religious cross.” The glyph and desc elements served as an introduction to the larger TEI P5 standard, as they were beyond TEI Lite’s schema. The TEI community’s ROMA tool was introduced to produce a customized schema with the glyph element and its subelement for validation and documentation. With each additional element outside TEI Lite, the ROMA tool provided the needed documentation. This example of advanced encoding was crucial in allowing students hands-on experience of the possibilities opened up by TEI.
oXygen’s feature to transform the encoded text to a web page display served as an aid for proofreading and visualization of the digital edition’s layout. It was a favorite of one student based on her remarks and repeated use of it.
The TEI header elements are similar to a library catalog record with more elements. The header contained a source description element for describing the digital edition. For this element, the students thoughtfully crafted statements about their edition, and in this part of the class they had an opportunity to formalize some of the editorial principles that they had been discussing during their encoding sessions. The header include an annotated bibliography compiled by the students.
These encodings will be part of the iteration performed on the remaining raw text until it is completely transformed into a digital edition by future classes. The last class will perform final proofreading and edits.
OUTCOMES AND ONWARD
Team teaching this iterative graduate class is enabling students to engage in the creation of original research that will result in a substantive, lasting outcome once the digital edition is launched. Students were able to benefit from combined expertise in Hispanist studies and in digital techniques, and the sum of that experience generated a detailed knowledge both of their early colonial manuscript and its nuances and of the editorial dilemmas faced within a scholarly digital environment. The union of very traditional paleography and bibliography skills with cutting-edge digital techniques gives students a good foundation in both areas of their chosen field, preparing them for both onward research and, pragmatically, the job market.
Team teaching also made it possible for the students to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time, as their discussions were mediated by the voices and research specializations of all three faculty members leading the class sessions. This setup created a truly immersive environment for the students, one that precisely models a modern research collaboration in the humanities and also that embodies the dynamics of a professional conference in the field. These intellectual experiences provide valuable professionalization opportunities for students that go beyond tangible skills of text encoding and into broader intellectual benefits, such as gaining confidence in speaking with professors on an equal footing as a fellow researcher and arguing for your point of view when particular encoding decisions had to be made. Team teaching can be administratively difficult, but it is well worth advocating for in order to give students an immersive, wide-ranging learning experience. In this instance, students’ work will, down the road, be visible online as part of the completed digital edition of the spiritual manuscript, giving them a lasting testament to their research and enabling them to have their first taste of contributing to their field in a permanent way, and it was all made possible via collaboration.
NOTE
1. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980: 128—38). Hall espouses three possible approaches or means a reader can use to position himself or herself when decoding a text: the dominant or hegemonic, the negotiated, and the oppositional. For Hall, decoding a work using the negotiated approach lets readers acknowledge the hegemonic definitions at work in the process while reserving the right to make a more negotiated examination of the text. Such an approach allows us to decode María’s Vida in a manner that takes into account the situational level, where we may find exceptions to the hegemonic reading and/or create new ground rules for approaching the text (137–38).
Using Digital Humanities to Flip the Humanities Classroom
University of Texas at Austin
Monash University
Duke University
THE PROCESS OF STAGING MOCK trials is a familiar element of most law school classrooms. Based on extensive research either on real or hypothetical cases, teams of students present arguments and evidence before a panel of judges. Such exercises are incorporated into legal curricula in universities across the world, and there are a range of domestic and international events that allow students to compete directly with each other in this format. This model is far less common in the humanities classroom, even though it presents valuable opportunities to facilitate student engagement with a range of sources and to promote interactive learning.
Beginning in 2017, we experimented with a new model for the flipped humanities classroom that we called Teaching with Trials. It was designed to create a mechanism for structured research, debate, and engagement by pairing a digital humanities platform with a three-week mock trial exercise. Students were challenged to work through large quantities of seventeenth-century primary source material online before taking on one of four roles—as members of a prosecution or defense legal team, witnesses, researchers, or judges—in a comprehensive restaging of a historical trial. Although the model is relatively new, it has so far produced outstanding results, generating a high degree of engagement while improving learning outcomes for students.