History 230

U.S. Women’s History to 1869

Wheaton College

Fall 2004

 

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Project Assignments

 

Over the course of the semester, students will undertake a project that is part of a larger Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) currently underway in several liberal arts colleges in the United States.  We will transcribe and edit the journal of Maria Wood, an ordinary white woman of the middle class and daughter of a minister, as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of gender ideology, race, religion, education, work opportunities, and other elements in women's lives.  We will spend portions of several class sessions on instruction for the TEI project.

 

Transcribing and tagging Maria Wood’s journal will give students a new opportunity to learn about primary sources in the study of U.S. women’s history.  Primary sources, in the form of legal and political texts, speeches, interviews, and excerpts from letters and diaries, have always been an important part of this course.  But students in this course have never before had the opportunity to encounter a handwritten primary source, transcribe and interpret it in the way they will this semester. 

 

By participating in the digitization and encoding process, students in my classes will learn and hone many of the skills important both to a student of history and to a participant in Wheaton’s new curriculum. By keying manuscripts into the computer, students will be learning and practicing their ability to read manuscripts. In encoding the text, students will necessarily have to think about them analytically, because encoding a document is analogous to creating a critical edition of it. Students will, therefore, improve their skills in reading and understanding primary sources and will learn the necessity of close reading for comprehending them.

 

In addition, this encoding project will provide students with the opportunity to experience the process of editing primary sources for broad distribution. This is an important process for History majors, in particular, to learn early in their careers at Wheaton, because it will prepare them for research projects that they will undertake in senior seminar. And this will make all students (regardless of their major) more sophisticated readers of such sources in print or on the Internet.

 

Finally, this project ties into the new curriculum by infusing technology into this course and by using materials focused on “issues pertaining to… people” (in this case, American women) who have been traditionally “neglected by Western scholarship.”

 

 

Student assignment for TEI Project: Maria Wood Journal—Fall 2004

 

This project consists of four (4) steps, each of which includes interaction with the text of Maria Wood’s journal and a written reflection on the process.