Devonshire

For this first phase of the project, the objective is to produce an online electronic edition which presents both a clean version of the text, and the scholarly apparatus that would be found in a conventional print edition. Our model is an edition in which there are two volumes, one containing the text, and one containing the apparatus. We aim to present these side-by-side, both scrolling under the user's control. The text will show line-numbering (every 5 lines), while the apparatus will refer to line numbers.

The full MS will be chunked for the purposes of display at the poem level (each poem is a <div> tag in the TEI XML).

There is an issue with "special" characters, which are currently represented by parenthetic symbols rather than actually encoded. For display, we want to use Unicode characters, but we also want to generate a normalized option for general readers. Meanwhile, the original XML must not be edited, for the present at least. Therefore, the first task is to use Transformer to create a replace sequence, which finds each special character signal and replaces it by a sequence of elements including the normalized reading and the Unicode character(s). This replace sequence can be run on the XML markup, and the result used for our project, while the original file is untouched. Whenever edits are made to the original, we can run the sequence again in Transformer, until eventually the characters are permanently replaced.

The site should also provide access to the original XML file as XML, and plain-readable CSS-rendered versions of the original and the Unicode-ized version, using Karin's CSS.

Following this process, we will examine the range and types of annotation in the document, and decide on the various categories of apparatus which will be displayed.

Meanwhile, Cara will be producing some data based on collation of other witnesses. This will be in the form of discrete XML files, linked with the poems in the original document using id-based mechanisms, which we will then link into the site in a simple manner.

This lays the groundwork for a more research-oriented process which experiments with various ways to display collations. This research work will take place after the goals for this phase of the project have been completed.