XML Exercise: The Ballad of Booker T.

Goals

This assignment should give you experience with text encoding a poem’s form, content, and references to other writings, people, and places relevant to the work. Think of this markup exercise as part of a larger project. Imagine you are preparing a digital collection of poems by Langston Hughes with XML markup and seek to include historical information about people, places, publications, and anything relevant to understanding his poetry.

Text and information to work with

For a first phase of work on this poem, start by representing it in its final state.

• Source text for the poem (copy and paste into an XML document). Start by applying markup to the line-structure of the poem, and then consider how to mark any formal patterns (like the repeated ballad refrain), and any details to mark within the lines. You do not need to represent the page layout of this source text from which you copied the poem, but find ways to include in markup any information you find relevant to the poem.
• Signed final draft photofacsimile: Include details from this image of the source document in your encoding.
• Read and refer to this introduction for details and context about the poem. Look for ways to include some of these details in your XML markup of the poem's words or lines.

Optionally: try including in markup some details about how Hughes revised some of the lines of the poem. You do not need to do this thoroughly now, since we will return to this poem in a future exercise to look at Langston Hughes’s stages of drafting it, and consider how to code his revisions to the lines.

When, where, and how to submit the assignment

Check and make sure you saved your file following our homework file naming rules, including giving it a .xml file extension. Submit your XML file on Canvas on Assignments (for XML Exercise 3) before our next class.