Description: The editing of and TEI/XML markup application to Jean Toomer's Cane is the centerpiece of the third chapter, "Marking Race in Jean Toomer’s Cane: TEI and the structures of Textual Knowledge," of my current book project, "Can a Computer Be Racist?: Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature."
One of the cornerstones of digital textual preservation in the digital humanities has been the creation of TEI/XML, the preferred metadata structure of literary and historical texts. Metadata application to literary texts, by now a technique with a long history in digital editing and literary study, is primarily structural, with the ability to follow patterns through a text in ways that are not easily seen by the reader. This chapter examines the structures produced and reproduced by the application of TEI/XML to Jean Toomer’s Cane, a significant text for scholars of African-American literature. Our understanding of Toomer’s representation of race is vexed by critical disagreement ranging from scholars who celebrate Toomer’s rich portrayals of early 20th-century Southern African-American life to scholars, such as Henry Louis Gates and Rudolph P. Byrd, who argue that Cane demonstrates that Toomer “was a Negro who decided to pass for white.” At the same time the book, one of our finest examples of a modernist text, is often pigeonholed into African-American literature and erased from scholarly discussions of the high modern (white) Americanists, writers such as T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner.
Unique to this project, I will use metadata applied to representations of race that will allow scholars to see Toomer’s use of racial identities in all their complexity. For example, in the novel’s chapter “Fern,” Fern is described as multiple races, from having a nose that looks Jewish, to skin tones of whiteness, to underlying black features. Toomer’s refusal to settle on one racial description highlights his resistance to understanding blackness as a singular category. Critics have noted that none of the short vignettes included in Cane represent a stark division of black and white. Instead, Toomer weaves subtle markers of color throughout his descriptions, leaving the reader to understand that the lingering effects of the “one drop” rule of race, where one drop of black blood legally constructs the individual as black, plays out in far more complicated ways than often considered. By marking each instance of racial representation and “coloration” in the text, then using visualization software to show how various formations of race and color play out through the text, we will be able to better understand Toomer’s complex work and, by extension, reveal the way that such techniques will be of use to scholars studying the representation of race in literature.
While we have some digital texts of Cane, none are accurate. The UPREP will assist in the transcription and editing of the volume, which will then serve as a testbed for TEI/XML.
Student Involvement: The student will work with the faculty member to edit the text. The student will help to OCR the text (apply computer technology to transform the image to text). OCR is is not fully accurate and will need to be checked once the process is complete. The student will learn to edit the text and apply basic TEI/XML, a standard humanities markup language, to select chapters.
Required Skills & Interest: No prior skills are necessary.
Benefits to Student & Faculty: Students interested in editing and digital publication will learn useful skills including using technology to assist in copyediting. In addition, the student will learn the use of XML in editing and digital humanities projects. Working with a student will allow me to move the corresponding chapter of my book forward.