I’m Michael Hawkins, a historian of early modern science and medicine. Since completing my PhD on Thomas Willis’s neurocartography of the passions at Imperial College London in 2004, I’ve spent most of my time staring at text and pointy brackets. I’ve helped establish encoding guidelines, trained transcribers, encoded materials in TEI XML while working on projects like the Casebooks Project, Darwin Correspondence Project, and Newton Project. I’ve also written the backend and frontend code to process and display them. Text and <pointyBrackets/> is my personal blog where I reflect on, and offer some solutions to the practical problems that I’ve encountered in my day-to-day work.