Ben Jonson Bibliography and Textual Variants in Semi-Dip
: Illya Nokhrin
Minutes: 60
Talked to JJ about two issues with Jonson-to-LEMDO conversion: textual variants in the old spelling/semi-diplomatic texts and the bibliography. After discussion with MH, we decided that we would convert the <app> and <rdg> tags into a double endpoint attachment. We will spin out the variants into a separate file with app/lem/rdg elements and a listWit element. We will also move textual notes encoded as comments into a note section. Most of this can be done with XSLT, but some things (like figuring out what the witnesses actual are) will have to be done by manual remediation after the fact.
As far as the bibliography goes, the Jonson bilbiography has substantially different formatting than LEMDO. Significantly, they provide only first initials for author/editor names. They also don’t appear to provide publisher names, only publisher locations. There are other differences in encoding that are less problematic to resolve programatically. However, given the large number of entries (close to 6000), it would take a very large amount of work to hand remediate, even if some of the conversion was done via XSLT. I’m planning to explore the potential for using an LLM to do the conversion, probably in a hybrid workflow with some XSLT.