DEMMR - March 2018 University of Pennsylvania Workshop

A Digital Editing Workshop with University of Pennsylvania MS Roll 1563

Category: Uncategorized

Homework 2018-03-31

Five Features Selected for Markup

Abbreviations

This manuscript has a large number of abbreviations that should be visible in both original abbreviated and expanded form. While more time-consuming, using the <choice> tag would allow users to see both forms and familiarize themselves with these conventions.

Special characters/abbreviations

My section has, among the more common  nasal suspension marks and -ibus marks, an ī and q3, which a novice reader may not have encountered. It’s crucial for learning purposes to preserve these marks while also elucidating their meaning. I would use an entity reference for the character itself and <expand> tags for the expanded words.

Missing/erased text

In a handful of places, my portion of the text is so badly effaced/faded that the word is uncertain. The <gap> tag can be used to enclose the letters that are unreadable while also pointing to the word itself for other researchers to examine and complete where possible.

Stains/discoloration

The section just below mine has a small stain that is likely just ink,  but I know that a pastedown mark and other stains exist throughout the roll. A <condition> tag will suffice for general descriptions of the stains, and <damage> may work for localizing the stains in the document itself.

Ligatures

This is admittedly a lesser concern, but ligatures can sometimes assist in assigning a provenance to a given work, and novice readers should become familiar with them to avoid mistaking a pair of letters for a distinct letter form. I would use an entity reference here to indicate the linkage of the two letters and enclose the letters themselves in this tag.

Pre-Workshop Reflection

In reading Burnard’s piece on hermeneutics and TEI, I first found myself reacting to his reminder that a text “is simultaneously an image…a linguistic construct…and an information structure.” For medieval manuscripts and their context, a text’s status as image is immediately apparent for paleographers and art historians whose work centers on the material object; scholars publishing an edition, whether as a physical book or a digital version, have tended to produce (until recently) a version of the text somewhat divorced from this original context. The possibility of reinforcing that image-to-text relationship through digital editing is one of the prospects that I found most enticing in preparing for this workshop, especially from a pedagogical standpoint. Medieval literature can sometimes pose daunting challenges for the novice undergraduate reader, and a sense of the text as a visual (and where possible, material) object can enhance appreciation for readers who find themselves repelled by a text’s initial difficulties.

Pre-Workshop Reflection

I am reflecting on how much I appreciated the basic introductory material in both of these articles. Burnard’s discussion of the term “markup” and introduction to “markup theory” was interesting and completely new to me. I have come across this term a dozen times and never stopped to consider what it actually means (in this context). I was struck by the heavy theoretical background to markup technologies that this article provides (even more striking that it was written in 1998)—I suppose I could have guessed that theory like this existed, but I have never been exposed to any of it. I appreciate the straightforward explanations of TEI and XML in the Gailey article, as well as the questions and problems surrounding them.

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