Close Reading and TEI

Since we’ve been doing close reading, I have been able to look at individual words and clarify the meaning that I did not know before. Once I’ve made these notes throughout my jests, the understanding becomes a lot easier. Also, mark ups helped me see what common words came about throughout my jests. I was able to link some jests together. Coming together as a class to discuss what tags were going to be used and how they were going to be used clarified any misunderstandings of words that are on the fence when it comes to tagging them. Instead of being so general with the tags, we only tagged specific people, places, or objects that had importance to the jest. This eliminated any words that did not have any significance to the jests.

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A theme occurring throughout the city and court jests is alcohol. Alcohol is a theme throughout my jests, but it is not as common in the country jests. Women are another trend more throughout the country jests. The tags all together helped me greatly understand the jest, but specifically the place names. Whether it was a specific place name such as Cuckold’s Haven, or a more general place like an alehouse, both gave me clues on to how Tarlton would act based on where he is. Also clarifying if the place such as being social, would benefit my understanding. My understanding of Tarlton has grown tremendously since the beginning of the semester. I have a much better sense of how much Tarlton does not care what others think about him. Social classes mean nothing to Tarlton. He will play a joke on anyone. However, the type of joke changes for higher or lower social classes. With higher social classes, he might say a clever comment about someone. With lower social classes, he is much more vulgar with his jokes, and sometimes they will be physical too such as when he pretends to drink his own piss but it is actually just wine. Reading my markup as a digital edition tells me that I am not just reading and understanding each individual jest. I am combining every jest and linking them together with individual words or themes. It was difficult to understand exactly what the objective of this project was when I was just working with my individual jests, but now they are all together marked up with tags and I can understand the similarities and differences happening in either the country, court, or city jests.

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