Ink color

My portion of the manuscript features a section of text written in black and another section written almost entirely in red ink.  The red sections should be tagged <hi rend=”red”>text</hi>.

Abbreviations

Since this manuscript features a number of abbreviations, I think we should expand them. Using the <choice> tag is an additional labor but would provide the most information for future readers of this edition and would preserve the original language. One example would be the language used for “Jesus” which appears to be frequently abbreviated with an abbreviation marker throughout the manuscript. That could be written using the <abbr> and/or <expan> tags, though it might be more clear to audiences to use <orig> and <reg> tags with <am> and <em> tags for what/where the marker occurs, so that the original abbreviation of Jesus with a variant spelling and marker is preserved while we simultaneously regularize it to something machine readable and recognizable to future scholars.

<choice>
<orig>ihu</orig>
<reg>Ihesu</reg>
</choice>

<!– Either Ihesu or Jesus would be fine in the regularized version since we would preserve the original in the <orig> tags.  Another thing we could do would be to include the <am> language for the abbreviation marker</am> in <orig> and provide <ex>es</ex> in the <reg> tag to indicate what has been expanded and regularized (see below). –>

<choice>
<orig>ih<am>&combmacr;</am>u</orig>
<reg>Ih<ex>es</ex>u</reg>
</choice>

Paleography

Much like abbreviations, I think it would be worthwhile to preserve the paleography, particularly in letter forms dissimilar to modern writing. The forms that stand out to me in my section of text are the long [s] , the rounded [r], and the biting [b] and [d]. I’m uncertain if our text includes thorns and yoghs, but I would want to encode those as well. I am used to encoding the dotted [y]  so that it is discernible from other visually similar letters. These components are an added labor and, while I have not found them to be an extra hassle during encoding, it would be something to watch for while working. In the past, I have used MUFI to get the language for the entities that correspond to specific glyphs (e.g. &thorn; for a thorn). Using the <g> tag on every glyph not available in modern English scripts would be an immense labor since we would then have to know and mark all of the brevigraphs (e.g. <g ref=”#per-glyph“>per</g>).

Language

My section of the manuscript features text in both Latin and Middle English, so those segments should be noted using either the <language> or <langUsage> tags. I recommend <langUsage> rather than <lang> because the TEI description of <langUsage> is for “describ[ing] the languages, sublanguages, registers, dialects, etc. represented within a text.”

Unclear text

In my section, there are some stained, faded, and rubbed areas of text that are difficult to read. I would want to encode these with the <unclear> tags, using attributes like @reason for why it’s difficult to read (e.g. reason=”faded”), @resp for who made the editorial choice on what the letters are, and @cert for how certain we are with the result (e.g. “low”, “medium”, “high”).