Empty Tags and Dis-contents: Strategies for Challenging Markup Teleologies

Lightning Talk

Katie Tanigawa and Jana Millar Usiskin

Biographies
Katie Tanigawa is an English PhD student at the University of Victoria and current HASTAC scholar.

Abstract
The TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative) guidelines ensure that the academic community remains consistent in their methods for encoding texts. However, as a tool constructed, implemented, and used extensively by scholars in the digital humanities, we must critically examine the TEI for how it may implicitly dis-content issues of gender and marginalized groups. Through an exploration of two digital encoding projects, this paper argues that TEI potentially dis-contents texts in two ways: [1] by excluding certain characters and spaces as viable data; and [2] by structurally privileging empirical data sets over interpretive ones. Building on the body of work by Wendy Chun, Tara McPherson, and Alan Liu, who all investigate the ways digital tools and spaces (under)represent marginalized groups, as well as Desmond Schmidt’s critique of TEI as an effective markup language, we argue that while strategies exist within the TEI to represent these marginalized characters and their spaces, the TEI structure fails to adequately privilege these strategies and thus re-inscribes both the racial and gendered hierarchies already at work within certain texts.