Witnessing Dickinson's Witnesses

Abstract

Emily Dickinson's experimental poetic compositions present exceptional challenges to the textual editor using TEI to mark up Dickinson's manuscript writings, particularly in the realm of tagging variants and versions. Focusing in particular on her use of intratextual and subtextual variant words, phrases, lines, and line groups, this paper examines several different scenarios for tagging variants and discusses each strategy's strengths and weaknesses. Bearing in mind textual theories that stress the autonomous nature of textual versions produced by variation, this essay also imagines future computing tools that rely upon TEI‐conformant tagging to automate visual representations of variant versions. Ultimately, no entirely satisfactory method of encoding Dickinson's variants emerges, as more simple encoding strategies fail to capture Dickinson's complexities in a way that can generate automated display, and more complicated strategies produce awkward, cumbersome code and retain TEI's known difficulties with tagging multiple and overlapping hierarchies.