Reading Traces

Idea and Process

The Occasion Map Papers include a heavily annotated copy of David Lewis's book We, the Navigators. Harold Garfinkel not only added extensive annotations to this book but also preserved the purchase receipt as part of this particular collection of papers.

Garfinkel’s meticulous curation of his working documents was neither accidental nor incidental; it was an integral aspect of his research methodology. Anne Rawls, the current director and a former student of Garfinkel, highlights the significance of his curatorial practices with two key examples: his strong opposition to archival methods that involve selective document handling or rearrangement, and his creation of a photo album that documented his workspace and organizational principles, aimed at preserving his systematic approach.

Garfinkel made both direct and indirect references to We, the Navigators. A notable example is his discussion of “stick maps of Pacific Island navigation,” mentioned in his application draft, Notes Comparing Two Analytic Formats of Occasion Maps of Way Finding Journeys: ‘Documentary’ and ‘Essential Procedural’.

This connection offers an opportunity to unite several project goals in a single example: understanding Occasion Maps through digitization, exploring Garfinkel’s methodology, and applying best practices in Digital Humanities critically. During the digitization of the Occasion Map Papers, a key aspect of text-based activities in Digital Humanities had to be considered: text encoding according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. TEI Guideline serves as a standard for encoding texts, enabling the representation of features such as structural, topological, linguistic, orthographic, documentary, and semantic elements [Footnote: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/26/4/463/1055470?redirectedFrom=fulltext].

TEI is used across various disciplines with diverse approaches. Its applications are remarkably broad, spanning contexts such as drama analysis, codicology, linguistics, and scholarly editions, to name just a few. Furthermore, it is employed in the print industry too as raw data for publishing in various formats.

TEI is a community-driven effort. In 1987, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) organized a meeting with 30 representatives from archives, universities, and humanities computing centers to bring order to the fragmented and inconsistent approaches to computational text studies that had emerged since the 1960s [footnote: https://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/papers/teiHistory.pdf]. To establish a common practice the group developed a set of principles to guide the process of developing encoding and exchange of literary and linguistic data. https://tei-c.org/Vault/SC/teipcp1.txt

In the case of the annotated copy of David Lewis’ book, TEI offered an opportunity to follow the “reading traces of Harold Garfinkel. In digital humanities, “reading traces” refers to the evidence of a reader’s engagement with texts, whether in physical or digital forms. These traces might include highlights, marginalia, notes, or even more subtle patterns like where a reader lingers on a page. By capturing, documenting, and analyzing these traces, researchers gain insights into how individuals or communities interpret and interact with literature, historical documents, or other textual materials. Such analysis can shed light on shifts in reading habits over time, variations in reader response across different media, and new pathways for scholarly collaborations.

TEI Examples