Question 5- The Encoding Challenge Result

For this week’s blogging question I would like to relate the experience I had with the last assignment. Although many people in the class may be tired of XML, I rather enjoyed the Encoding Challenge. It became both fulfilling and engaging, since the task was not overly simple and required true decision making. Additionally, it truly aided in understanding the premise of markup language and was a valuable hands-on task. Above all, the Encoding challenge would be a project that I would recommend and should continue as a staple for this class.

With its cluster of texts and strange filters of colour, an XML code may appear to be disinteresting or monotonous to an outside observer. However, plugging away the information and transforming an image into our own interpretation surprisingly became entertaining. New ideas kept arising and better formats and strategies continuously moulded the work into a well devised product. With the entire code before us, through all the decisions we made, and the numerous brightly coloured tags, there was a sense of accomplishment. We had created something that had likely never been attempted and it was the result of great teamwork and collaboration.  

Conversing with me peers throughout the develop of our schema and code, it became apparent that no one else would understand our dialogue. This aspect became rather amusing and humorous, at least to myself; we had created a close connection to our work and had formed a particular language. Certain areas of the piece were being referred to in abbreviations, standard TEI jargon was being employed, and by the end we had a new perspective on our example that we chose to encode. Every minute detail of that comic panel had been examined and we may now realize the complex relations of all the parts, which would not be obvious from a first glance. In a way, the XML encoding orders and reduces the information into a comprehensive form, what was once a fairly chaotic graph of spurting thoughts has become a structured linear article. As a whole, one may now appreciate the advantage of XML analysis; it focuses the participant to survey and highlight every significant feature of a text.