As a musician, encoding never seemed like it would be in my wheelhouse. I suppose
the nature of the beast gets obscured by the myth – If I pictured mark-up code, I
did not see the reality, but instead the lines of binary from Swordfish or The Matrix.
It turns out that working in the disciplines of English and Music actually formed
natural segues into coding.
The correlation between the critical academic pursuits of English studies and the
array of encoding forms is decidedly tighter than I had first envisioned it to be.
Simply put, the fact that code functions as a language renders it vulnerable to the
majority of grammatical and syntactical methods and dissections that run deep into
the English major’s toolkit.
Before I was introduced to the functions and practice of XML and CSS encoding, my
experience with technical praxis was limited to production software - particularly
the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) kind. I figured that mixing demos and live
recordings with colour-coded sliders and digital equalizers wouldn’t have much bearing
on encoding, but it turns out that audio editing and markup are both heavily dependent
on an OCD-like tendency towards presentation. Both editing environments can be conceived
through the idea of the idea and the witness: the original work to be encoded (or
musical piece to be recorded) can only be testified to by the witnesses (the textual
in-hand documents, the scans, the prints, the audio files, the discs), and it is the
job as the encoder or producer to prepare this witness as truthfully and fitfully
as possible.
These two practices came to a head during my encoding of Thomas Middleton’s ‘The Triumphs of Truth,’ in which sheet music is present in the original printings (fig. 1).
The difficulty of representing the music in a digital reproduction presents questions
of conservation, utility, and useability. Do we replicate it identically, early modern
notation and all? Do we render it as a playable WAV file, attempting to expand a user’s
experience? Do we present the original and then provide modern renditions and interpretations
along side? The producer in me pushes for idyllic representation - rendering the notation
through MEI resources, and then creating interactive and playable segments to offer
the user an immersive and accurate experience. The encoder, however, wants direct
representation of early modern notation, mineable and executable, yes, but no remediations
or designs. How do we, as encoders, researchers, and those passionate for the humanities,
choose to both represent and create? Direct representation is essentially the domain
of the scanner and the microfilm - preparing archival material digitally should create
new resources for research and experience; the trick is to preserve the material while
enhancing it, I suppose.
Cite this page
MLA citation
Virani, Zaqir. Encoding as WYSIWYG Production.The Map of Early Modern London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 20 Jun. 2018, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm.
Chicago citation
Virani, Zaqir. Encoding as WYSIWYG Production.The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed June 20, 2018. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm.
APA citation
Virani, Z. 2018. Encoding as WYSIWYG Production. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm.
RIS file (for RefMan, EndNote etc.)
Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
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ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Encoding as WYSIWYG Production
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PY - 2018
DA - 2018/06/20
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm
UR - http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml/standalone/BLOG1.xml
ER -
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RT Web Page
SR Electronic(1)
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A6 Jenstad, Janelle
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FD 2018/06/20
RD 2018/06/20
PP Victoria
PB University of Victoria
LA English
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LK http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm
TEI citation
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Janelle Jenstad, associate professor in the department of English at the University
of Victoria, is the general editor and coordinator of The Map of Early Modern London. She is also the assistant coordinating editor of Internet Shakespeare Editions. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival,
the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. Her articles have appeared
in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from
Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), and Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, forthcoming). She is currently working on an edition of The Merchant of Venice for ISE and Broadview P. She lectures regularly on London studies, digital humanities, and
on Shakespeare in performance.
Research assistant, 2013-15, and data manager, 2015 to present. Tye completed his
undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–present; Associate Project Director, 2015–present;
Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014; MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander
comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project
to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the
Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social
and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources
that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation
and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and
so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise
to bear on the MoEML project.
Programmer, 2018-present; Junior Programmer, 2015 to 2017; Research Assistant, 2014
to 2017. Joey Takeda is an MA student at the University of British Columbia in the
Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA
honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria
in 2016. His primary research interests include diasporic and indigenous Canadian
and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Graduate Research Assistant, 2013-14. Zaqir Virani completed his MA at the University
of Victoria in April 2014. He received his BA from Simon Fraser University in 2012,
and has worked as a musician, producer, and author of short fiction. His research
focuses on the linkage of sound and textual analysis software and the work of Samuel
Beckett.
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC).
Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database
implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the
project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was
a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
