Assignment
For this project, you will each encode a short text, selected from a set of options we will provide you; if you find a text on your own that you would like to use instead, you must clear it with us first. You will encode your texts individually but you’ll do so following a set of standards that you’ll create as a group. As a group, you’ll make decisions about how to handle encoding the documents in your collection—considering questions of regularization and normalization, annotation, editorial analysis, modeling of document structures and contents, and so on. You’ll also make decisions about how to represent your texts online. You’ll then write an editorial declaration that will clearly outline the standards your group has established for encoding your collected documents, as well as the decisions you’ve made about creating digital editions of those documents. Individually, you will encode your document, following the standards established by your group, and write a descriptive introduction to your text, indicating authorship, date, genre, audience, and whatever other basic information you think is important for understanding your text.
See here for guidelines on how you should make encoding and publication decisions—and how you should write about these in your editorial declaration.
Examples
You can download the files we demonstrated in class below. To start creating your own encoded texts, download the “TEI exercise package” at the WWP’s resources page, go into the “content” folder, and open the “exercise_template” file. You can (and probably should) rename the file with your own information, but you should make sure to save it in the “content” folder.
- Basic encoding principles
- Encoding sample
- Poor Robin’s True Character of a Scold encoding (facsimile link from EEBO)
- Sample encoding (save in the “content” folder in your own TEI exercise folder to link the sample encoding with the exercise schema; you can download the TEI exercise folder at the “WWP Resources” link below)
- Sample encoding with analytical tagging
- TEI Boilerplate display (without analytical tagging)
- TEI Boilerplate display (with analytical tagging)
- The Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Child encoding (facsimile link from EEBO)
- Sample CSS file
Links and resources
- Guidelines for making and documenting encoding decisions
- CSS Crib Sheet
- Women Writers Online
- WWP Wiki: Getting Started with Encoding
- “Even Gentler” introduction to XML
- WWP Statement of Editorial Principles
- WWP Internal Documentation
- Slideset: An Introduction to XML
- Slideset: Basic Tagging
- WWP Resources (including the “TEI exercise package” you need to get started)
- Element Crib Sheet
- Mary Moody Emerson Prototype Display
- Oxygen XML Editor
- TEI Boilerplate
- Unicode Quick Guide
- TEI Appendix C: Elements (the TEI Guidelines are currently down, but you can access a copy of this appendix here)