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, 26 Jun. 2020, 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 26, 2020. https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm.
APA citation
Virani, Z. 2020. Encoding as WYSIWYG Production. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://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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CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG1.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml/standalone/BLOG1.xml
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TEI citation
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Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017.
Joey Takeda was a graduate 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 included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature,
critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate
honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Research Assistant, 2013-2014. 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 focused on the linkage
of
sound and textual analysis software and the work of Samuel Beckett.
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.
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer
Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of
Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A
Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If
You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and
Reformation,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 Institutional Culture in Early
Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage,
The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre
Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching
Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity
in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the
Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early
Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern
English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names:
Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making
Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking
Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies
(Routledge, 2018).
Janelle Jenstad authored or edited the following items in MoEML’s bibliography:
Jenstad, Janelle. Building a Gazetteer for Early Modern London, 1550-1650.Placing Names. Ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth
Mostern, and Humphrey Southall. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2016. 129-145.
Jenstad, Janelle. The
Burse and the Merchant’s Purse: Coin, Credit, and the Nation in Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.The
Elizabethan Theatre XV. Ed. C.E. McGee and A.L.
Magnusson. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 2002. 181–202.
Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. The City Cannot Hold You: Social Conversion in the Goldsmith’s
Shop.Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (2002): 5.1–26..
Jenstad, Janelle. The Gouldesmythes Storehowse: Early Evidence for
Specialisation.The Silver Society Journal 10 (1998): 40–43.
Jenstad, Janelle. Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil
Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 373–403. doi:10.1215/10829636–34–2–373.
Jenstad, Janelle. Public
Glory, Private Gilt: The Goldsmiths’ Company and the Spectacle of Punishment.Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society. Ed.
Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 191–217. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Smock
Secrets: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage.Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Katherine
Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 87–99. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Using
Early Modern Maps in Literary Studies: Views and Caveats from London.GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. Ed.
Michael Dear, James Ketchum, Sarah
Luria, and Doug Richardson. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Stow, John. A SVRVAY OF
LONDON. Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate, and description
of that Citie, written in the yeare 1598. by Iohn Stow Citizen of London. Also an
Apologie (or defence) against the opinion of some men, concerning that Citie, the
greatnesse thereof. With an Appendix, containing in Latine, Libellum de situ &
nobilitate Londini: written by William Fitzstephen, in the raigne of Henry the
second. Ed. Janelle Jenstad and
the MoEML Team. MoEML. Transcribed. Web.
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.
