Reading Traces

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 (cf. 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

CLOSING STATEMENT OF THE VASSAR PLANNING CONFERENCE

1.    The guidelines are intended to provide a standard format for data
      interchange in humanities research.

2.    The guidelines are also intended to suggest principles for the
      encoding of texts in the same format.

3.    The guidelines should

      a.    define a recommended syntax for the format,

      b.    define a metalanguage for the description of text-encoding
            schemes,

      c.    describe the new format and representative existing schemes
            both in that metalanguage and in prose.

4.    The guidelines should propose sets of coding conventions suited
      for various applications.

5.    The guidelines should include a minimal set of conventions for
      encoding new texts in the format.

6.    The guidelines are to be drafted by committees on

      a.    text documentation

      b.    text representation

      c.    text interpretation and analysis

      d.    metalanguage definition and description of existing and pro-
            posed schemes,

      coordinated by a steering committee of representatives of the
      principal sponsoring organizations.

7.    Compatibility with existing standards will be maintained as far as
      possible.

8.    A number of large text archives have agreed in principle to sup-
      port the guidelines in their function as an interchange format.
      We encourage funding agencies to support development of tools to
      facilitate this interchange.

9.    Conversion of existing machine-readable texts to the new format
      involves the translation of their conventions into the syntax of
      the new format.  No requirements will be made for the addition of
      information not already coded in the texts.

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 discourse, “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 interpretations.

We, the Navigators, page 54. Garfinkel writes annotations as marginalia and uses arrows to expand, marks sections with big square brackets and highlights some sentences in different colors (right: code-snippet from the TEI-XML File)

In an alignment with the project’s ethnomethodological goals, the process started with examination of best practices of research in the area of reading traces.

Two particular approaches are given special focus: the Theodor Fontane Archive’s collaboration with the Urban Complexity Lab at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences on Fontane’s reference library, and the Beckett Digital Library Project, which offers a digital reconstruction of Samuel Beckett’s personal library— with transcriptions of reading traces and connections to his manuscripts.

With its intensive focus on reading traces, the Fontane Reference Library project has developed a systematic categorization of the traces, trying to shed new light on his engagement with texts. The main categories are Marginalia (e.g., comments, text corrections, translations), Markings (e.g., underlines, strikethroughs, highlights), Provenance Information (e.g., ownership stamps, handwritten notes), Additional Material (e.g., glued-in newspaper clippings), and a catch-all category called 'Other' for things like stains or dog-eared pages.

These categorial work taken as best-practice produced ‘troubles’ in two areas. On the one hand mundane, functional traces like cross-references and directives as in ‘doings’ are left out. Additionally function of any type of trace not defined, although they seem to follow a 'functional order' depending on its properties. Marking forms and types in Garfinkel’s traces exemplify this: arrows, brackets, asterisk, circles etc. seem to create a 'layer of meaning', which is not 'intrinsically integrated' into 'categorization work'. Encoding alone can only mark them as markings without unfolding their 'doings' as a layer of making sense of the text at the encoding level. To counteract that encoding concentrated on typology of shapes to at least list the specifics. Second area of ‘trouble’ here is the point of contact between these categories and the formalities of TEI. In its schema TEI offers no specific module for encoding reading traces but there are some elements which can be used to integrate categorial work on the traces with the affordances of TEI: