TEI Exercise 1: an historic survey document

Introducing the TEI and Anna Julia Cooper

This is the first of a series of assignments to introduce you to the XML-based language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We will be working with some photofacsimiles of manuscripts digitally curated by Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner from Penn State University for the Digital Howard’s Anna Julia Cooper collection. For this first exercise, we begin by meeting the remarkable Anna Julia Cooper through her handwritten response to a survey of black college graduates in 1930. The survey provides a structure and prompts that are of interest for providing structure and framework for Cooper’s replies, which eventually exceed the form’s prescribed entry lines.

The TEI provides a shared international language for encoding culturally significant documents to represent their meaningful content (or their semantics). Form and structure in documents like surveys are meaningful aspects of a document, as are the handwritten replies and the way they respond to the dimensions laid out on the page surfaces. This document provides a fascinating opportunity to apply the TEI’s guidelines for encoding manuscripts and primary sources. There is nothing quite like this form used as an example in the Guidelines, but the Guidelines do provide examples and tagging that we can try to adapt to a task of encoding this document.

Our objectives are to:

• Study the survey document to get an idea of the significance of its data and metadata.
• Begin learning the TEI by a task-driven exercise to research the Guidelines seeking elements and attributes to apply if you were going to markup this document completely.

Note: Your task is not to mark up the whole survey, though you may want to experiment a little with markup and transcription. Instead, you are researching the TEI to see how you might apply it to this document and learn about elements and attributes that might be useful to you.

Resources to study

For this exercise, begin by reading about Anna Julia Cooper to learn who she was, and to learn about this survey. Then, study the survey document carefully and take notes on what you would like to do to organize the survey questions and answers. Next, instead of writing your own markup, turn to the TEI Guidelines to research what markup strategies to use. Collect some sections of the Guidelines to apply, together with elements and attributes that seem like they might work for your purposes. Start here:

• Analyze the survey document as posted in the Digital Howard collection. Take some notes as you review the document about what you would want to capture in markup about the survey, the questions and answers, and any relevant information that you see in the photofacsimile.
• Read a biographical sketch of Anna Julia Cooper to put the survey in context.
• Read about Cooper’s essay, My Racial Philosophy and how she drafted in response to this survey.

Now, begin researching the TEI Guidelines to find relevant sections for coding the survey. Specifically, take notes on what markup from the TEI you think would be helpful from the following resources in the Guidelines:

• Chapter 3: Elements Available in All TEI Documents
• Chapter 4: Default Text Structure
• How would you encode the handwriting of Anna Julia Cooper as distinct from the printed typescript on the form? Consider what sections and markup might be relevant in Chapter 10: Manuscript Description. Suggestion: Take a look at sections 10.7.1.6 (Layout Description) through 10.7.2.1 (Writing).
• Skim through Chapter 11: Representation of Primary Sources and take a look at section 11.3.1.1 (Core Elements for Transcriptional Work) in particular.

Plotting strategy: Identify markup from the TEI to use

TEI projects are best begun with a round of debate and discussion and comparing notes, so in that spirit, complete this first TEI exercise by writing a post on our textEncoding-Hub Issue for this assignment. In the post, describe what you think is important to mark in the survey, and link to passages in the TEI Guidelines defining elements and attributes that we should use in this project. You may comment on how you would want to approach the markup of the survey and the handwriting whether or not you find good matches for what you wish to do in the TEI Guidelines. Raise questions and respond to each other about passages in the Guidelines that you are not certain about but seem relevant to our task.