Encoding Challenge, INF 2331H: The Future of the Book (Winter 2016)

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This assignment teaches XML text encoding as a curatorial practice in which the remediation of a text yields insight into the text’s structure, meaning, and material form. In the context of the course as a whole, this curatorial experiment helps students understand how specific formats serve as “conceptual frameworks for knowledge” and also illuminates the relation between artifacts and the meaning they carry. Students are given freedom to make interpretive and representational choices but are asked to explain and justify those choices. This assignment could be easily adapted to a wide variety of courses and would work equally well with archival materials, literary and historical documents, manuscripts, and other artifacts that invite discussion of the relation between the physical carrier and the text.