Interventions
How it works
If you’ve ever underlined a passage of text in order to foreground its importance or added marginalia to an essay to capture your own response to the material, you’ve engaged in an analog form of markup. As a term, “markup” evokes the process of making marks on a printed page with a pen, pencil, or highlighter. It adds an element to the text in order to communicate information about that passage. Instead of a highlighter or pencil, digital markup relies on a feature called a “tag.” They appear at the beginning and end of a passage, and they use a controlled vocabulary to describe the kind of content that they contain. For example, the tags for a highlighted passage look like this:This <span class="keyterm">is relevant</span> to my interests.
In this case, the <span> tag distinguishes the phrase “is relevant” from preceding and proceeding passages. The element “span” refers to the fact that this is a span of text. The “class” distinguishes this division from other spans of text by identifying it as an important term or phrase. </span> marks the end of the passage.
All markup languages follow this structure, but the vocabulary of tags varies. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is most often used on webpages to structure content. In order for content to display correctly on the widest array of devices, websites follow the HTML5 standard. This means that while new classes and ids can be added, the tag must contain one of the elements described in the HTML5 list of acceptable tags. eXtensible Markup Languages (XML) gives coders the freedom to define new tags and classes. This flexibility is especially important for scholarly projects like Livingstone Online and the Victorian Women Writers Project, for not all of their content can be represented through the tags described in the HTML standard. Instead, many critical editions of manuscript and print material, including the aforementioned projects, use XML to represent people, places, and things represented in the text. They use tags that are proscribed by the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, an international consortium of scholars, museum curators, and archivists. Hence, the acronym TEI is often used as shorthand to describe this particular dialect of XML.
Markup languages work in tandem with styling languages to control the visual design of a page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) often accompany HTML pages whereas XML and TEI rely on eXtensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT). Both CSS and XSLT look for tags and then manipulate the visual layout of these text. For example, to highlight all “keyterm” passages in blue and to render the text white, I would add the following CSS:
.keyterm {
background: #026697;
color: #FFFFFF;
}
So that "This <span class="keyterm">is relevant</span> to my interests." is rendered as "This is relevant to my interests."
Though this might seem rather mundane, adding tags to transcriptions of manuscript material changed the kinds of research questions that I was asking about magic lantern shows. As an extension of my work on David Livingstone, I volunteered to transcribe manuscripts from South African archives for a digital critical edition hosted by Livingstone Online. In an effort to foreground Livingstone’s African context, the project uses TEI to highlight African people and places.[1] TEI also enabled us to add modern spellings alongside the historic ones. The mechanical process of adding these tags to transcriptions of his letters not only helped me learn more about Livingstone’s African context, but it also prompted me to think about the Africans who were in the audience of his lantern shows. When I returned to the passage of Missionary Travels that described Livingstone’s lantern show in Kabompo, I recognized the names of different African ethnic groups that I had tagged in his letters. Marking up texts with TEI helped me to see Livingstone’s lantern show not solely in black and white terms but as a microcosm of the diverse and complex African cultural context.
Historic names, modern context
To foreground the presence of non-European people and perspectives in the texts that I remediated for this dissertation, I adapted Livingstone Online’s TEI practices for HTML. In transcriptions I bracketed historic spellings with a “span” tag and added title attribute with the modern spelling of the name. For example, the code for Mzilikazi looks like this:<span class="alt" title="Mosilikatze">Mzilikazi</span>
Current naming practices are often more faithful to the languages spoken by non-European communities. Including both of these names in the HTML enabled me to provide an accurate transcription of the text without simply remediating nineteenth-century perspectives. In prose, I use current naming practices in the text and provide the historic spelling in the span tag in order to privilege non-European naming practices.
Victorian editorial interventions
TEI-encoding also trained me to identify and expose editorial interventions. Livingstone Online signals additions, deletions, and overwriting to the text. Where possible, we also transcriptions of altered passages. Because I paid special attention to these passages while transcribing letters for the project, I became more aware of the differences between unpublished and published versions of manuscript material. To track these changes, I added a span tag to Victorian editorial interventions and then used CSS to visually distinguish them from the rest of the prose. To facilitate comparison, I structured transcriptions of sources as a table so that they would be displayed side-by-side on screen. Exposing editorial changes on such a granular level led to unexpected insights. For example, the announcement of John Williams death was remediated through two newspapers before it was printed in the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle.[2] The HTML and CSS make The Bengal Hurkaru more visible as an intermediary; the minor changes in punctuation and capitalization that the Hurkaru’s editor made to the original Australian article are preserved in the Chronicle.Uniting these texts on the same web page also throws the analog and digital technologies of newspaper preservation into sharper relief. Two of these newspapers are available through open-access digital collections; Trove contains a full transcription The Australian as well as a pdf, and a pdf of the Chronicle is available via Google Books. The Hurkaru, however, is only available via microfiche, which I borrowed from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through Interlibrary Loan. Transcribing these texts and remeditating them in the form of a table overcomes the limitations of their respective mediating technologies.
The Visual Rhetoric of Footnotes
Visual cues not only expose Victorian editorial interventions but also make my own scholarly labor more visible. I did not realize to what extent footnotes contribute to the visual rhetoric of scholarly rigor until I was writing and publishing with a tool that could not add them. In Scalar, “annotations” can be added to video and to images, but they cannot be added to prose. Other Scalar projects use a variety of strategies to account for this. Dwayne Dixon’s dissertation “Endless Questions” includes parenthetical citations extensively, but the project does not have footnote-like annotations. Celeste Sharpe’s dissertation “They Need You!” uses Scalar’s note feature to provide bibliographic information and annotations. In early version of this site, I followed Sharpe’s strategy to remediate information that I would include as footnotes in document-based media as notes. This technique worked particularly well for adding visual material, like this zoetrope, because it allowed me to briefly reference an object without having to embed it on the page. For longer asides or references to other portions of the dissertation, the page would be hard to read as a note, so I used a hyperlink. However, this way of storing information separates the annotation from the content it supplements. The annotation remained invisible unless the reader clicked on it. In print-based media, the presence of annotations is not only visible but also tangible. The thickness of the bibliography at the end of the monograph is a tactile measurement of the project’s scholarly rigor. For readers accustomed to print-based media, the visual absence of annotations and citations implied that the dissertation did not engage with critical sources nor did it provide sufficient documentation of its scholarly processes.Scalar projects built by faculty haven’t fully addressed this shortcoming. These projects often remediate the conventions of print by adding footnotes, but this information tends to be stored on a separate page. Matthew F. Delmot’s The Nicest Kids in Town includes a textual marker where a footnote would be and adds a link at the bottom of the page to a separate page with the prose for all of these annotations at the bottom of the page.[3] When Melodies Gather by Samuel Liebhaber includes parenthetical citations that hyperlink to a bibliography page, but the pages do not contain annotations.[4] Given the conventions of faculty projects, the visual rhetoric of footnotes in print, and the misunderstanding caused by Scalar’s annotation structures, it became clear that I needed a way to add information to the prose that would be stored on the page it annotated without visually cluttering the page.
Because I do not have the Javascript skills that I would need to add such functionality to Scalar, I relied on support from Indiana University's digital humanities community. Daniel Story, the Digital Methods Specialist at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, wrote the script needed to make textual markers inserted into the prose interactive. I then styled these textual cues ( [1] ) to match the visual vocabulary of hyperlinks in order to convey that an action was needed in order to display information. I also styled the footnotes to visually contrast the white background of the Scalar page. This strategy adds active and passive modes of visualizing my scholarly labor. By inviting clicking, the prose invites curiosity and interaction as it exposes the ways that my analysis participates in critical conversations about missionaries, magic lanterns, and global history. Keeping the prose of the footnotes at the bottom of the page echoes the materiality of bibliographies because the reader has to scroll through them in order to navigate to the next page.
[1] Click here for the full TEI coding guidelines.
[2] I discuss these editorial changes and what they reveal about the global circulation of missionary narratives in print in “Comparing the Announcements.”
[3] Click here for an example.
[4] For an example, click here.
