Text Mark-ups

Over the past two weeks, working with close reading has been a very interesting experience. Close reading allowed me to understand the texts I was assigned a lot more than if I were to just read them and not has taken a closer look. There were many steps we used during close reading with our assigned jests. One of the steps was to go through and mark up the different people, places, roles, objects, and the words that were unfamiliar to us. By doing this I thought more about what everything was such as whether something was the name of a person or the name of a place. Although there were a few words where I had to read them in context multiple times to figure out what they were in the end I was able to figure them out. Marking up the texts immensely affected my understanding for the jests in a great way.

Another step in the close reading process we had to do was collaborate as a class and come up with different marking tags such as city, street, and social. Collaborating with the class to decide whether or not and how to tag a word also helped in my understanding of the text. Deciding on what to tag certain things was a big problem I ran into for some of my places. Where I might have tagged something as a “street”, together as a class we collaborated and decided to tag it as “social”. For example I had the place “Wood Street Counter” with the opinions of others we decided to tag this as “social” where I probably would not have if it weren’t for their opinion. Although getting their opinion outside of class was hard, the opinions provided in class helped immensely.

What the text looked like when editing in Oxygen.

Across all the jests (Court, City, Country) I was not able to pick up a specific trend or issue that emerged. The different places definitely portrayed a different set of people the Tarlton encountered.

Out of the many different tags we came up with, the main tag that made me think about the relationship Tarlton had with people, actions, and different events was the tag “social”. This tag in particular made me realize who Tarlton really was throughout the jests by some of the certain places he hung out at. I do not recall having one jest where Tarlton did not associate himself with someone, he was always talking to a maid, a master, or a townie. I never put any thought to this before we were tagging different places as “social”.

Earlier in the semester when we first started discussing Tarlton, I did not understand much about who he was or what his jests were about. Now I have a better understanding of who he is and by taking a close look at the jests I am now able to grasp an understanding of what is going on. Close reading has had a great impact on my understanding for these jests.

Reading my markups in a digital edition version showed me all the different things I had to look at and consider when reading through the jests. This format put in perspective how all the work we have been doing over the past couple weeks has helped me understand what I was reading a lot more than if I were to just read it before it was marked up. If it were not for all this work I would not understand the jests like I do now.