Lead Researcher: Mel Williams
I. Overview
The Mapping Black London Project is a collaborative effort between NU Boston and NU London to challenge the assumption that Britain’s Black presence was limited to post-1945. In addition to showcasing the lives of key Black figures and communities through exhibitions, the Mapping Black London Project organizes outreach events to raise awareness about knowledge discrepancies. I joined the Mapping Black London Project in a support role as part of my research assistantship with the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative. In collaboration with Dr. Aljoe, the NU Boston project lead, we concluded that a TEI encoding of the Letters of Ignatius Sancho would facilitate a comprehensive analysis of this work via digital methodologies and offer a new perspective on Sancho’s letter-writing techniques as a means of resistance against the racialized frameworks of the 18th century. I began attending weekly meetings with the MBL team to better understand the team’s priorities and explore best practices in encoding, as well as identify elements that would yield the best results in identifying patterns in the writing.
Before I began encoding, I developed a framework to address the following questions:
- What are some standard features found in Ignatius Sancho’s letter-writing style, and how do they reflect letter-writing practices of the 18th century?
- What constitutes literary figures, paraphrased allusions, and biblical references, and how can these categories be meaningfully identified and encoded using TEI?
- How can TEI best be adapted to represent language about race in a way that will aid in the development of a schema?
From these questions, I developed the three foundational principles that informed my methodology for encoding Sancho’s letters:
- Prioritizing Sancho’s rhetorical strategies and moral positioning: The initial goal of the project was to utilize TEI as a method to identify and encode patterns in Sancho’s writing, specifically examining his use of language, tone, and literary references to challenge 18th-century writing practices. Encoding decisions were guided by a desire to focus on rhetorical strategies, particularly as they relate to race and identity.
- Recognizing the limitations of encoding and the importance of developing a schema in collaboration with the team. As I inherently make choices regarding the text during encoding, formulating the principles of a potential schema has been crucial in determining what merits attention in the text.
- Committing to ethical and collaborative schema development. I aligned my encoding decisions with established TEI practices and remained open to adaptations and feedback to effectively determine how to develop a schema for this and other similar projects. I chose encoding practices that were significant to my research interests and simultaneously aligned with the objectives of the Mapping Black London team.
II. Methodology
To encode these letters, I utilized the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language, which enabled me to employ a comprehensive range of tags to represent the letters in XML. Initially, the goal was to identify features in the text that would enable me to discern patterns in Sancho’s writing and to demonstrate how his style of letter writing contributed to or diverged from that of other writers of the time. However, as I began to encode and consider the possibility after comparing this work to those of other 17th- and 18th-century Black authors, I eventually proposed developing a “Sancho” schema to better identify references to race in this text and the works of other authors.
To maintain ethical encoding practices, I have outlined my decision-making process below. However, to be as transparent as possible, it is also worth noting my limitations in encoding this text. Primarily, my approach is biased because I am making decisions about what is important to me in these texts and choosing letters in which I notice specific patterns. As I continue to work with the Mapping Black London team, my goal is to continue to collaboratively identify appropriate markers within TEI guidelines to identify this language before developing a specific schema.
I relied on general letter encoding practices to encode the document structures, utilizing tags such as <div type=”letter”>, <dateline>, <opener>, and <closer> to outline the text’s structure. I experimented with several tags to ensure that I could later retrieve information meaningful to my research interests.
For example, I encoded all author names with the <name type=”literary”> tag to denote that they were references to authors. I used a <name “type=”character”> tag for every mention of a literary character. In general, I could distinguish a character name from a regular <persName> tag through the context of the letter and the fact that most names (excluding references to authors) in these letters are omitted with two consecutive em dashes. In some instances, this is not as clear.
In addition to literary terms, I examined the integration of Christian references and religious language utilizing the <term type=”religious”> and <name type=”deity”> tags. In a first reading of Sancho’s letters, I determined that religion played a significant role in Sancho’s life as well as in his rhetorical strategy. Therefore, by encoding instances of biblical references, my goal was to investigate later whether Sancho employed these allusions to assert his moral equality to his white contemporaries and challenge racialized interpretations of Christianity that devalued Black moral worth. However, encoding religious mentions proved to be more challenging, as there are instances when Sancho refers to God or Christianity and then lists a series of characteristics that he associates with Christian values. Because encoding every reference to a character trait would be impractical, I focused on tagging every reference to God to identify any patterns in the surrounding sentences or words used. The constraints of this method pertain to the word count in my sample text. An expanded corpus of Sancho’s work would enable me to analyze linguistic patterns using software like AntConc, facilitating a deeper understanding of the usage of specific words within the text.
III. Future Considerations & Final Thoughts
This project focused on encoding Ignatius Sancho’s letters to establish a foundation for analyzing his rhetorical strategies regarding language, power, and identity. Future research should expand the corpus to compare his work with that of his contemporaries and the literary figures he cites. A larger dataset with a predefined schema would allow for qualitative close reading and linguistic analysis using digital tools. Analyzing the frequency and context of specific terms, particularly religious language, offers insights into the evolution of Sancho’s rhetorical choices regarding his social and political beliefs. Developing a schema is also promising because it could shed light on patterns of resistance and rhetorical strategy across the early Black Atlantic literary archive. In this context, creating a schema that encapsulates race-related language within an 18th-century framework, moral discourse, and rhetorical resistance could serve as a vital instrument for encoding similar texts.
Another exciting direction is to continue understanding Sancho’s world through the visualization of his intertextual networks. By encoding references to authors, texts, religion, and moral themes, we can initiate the construction of network diagrams to better understand how Sancho’s letters both influenced and were influenced by contemporary works. This will also assist in understanding how intertextuality operates not just as a literary technique but as a form of cultural positioning, bringing us a little closer to understanding the importance of the work of Black authors in 18th-century London.
