TEI | Hell’s Printing Press

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends

10 December 2015

We’ve blogged a few times about our progress with the Four Zoas encoding project, mostly recounting our efforts to develop a more flexible and dynamic schema as well as create an experimental display that takes advantage of our new XML elements. This progress has been slow but steady, and after a rigorous round of development focusing on a single difficult object, we’re ready to test our work across more objects and expand the schema to incorporate more textual features.

So as a theatrical monarch once said, “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Except, I can promise it will be more than just once.

Digital Humanities, XML

DHSI and the Four Zoas: Part 2

23 October 2015

As I explained in my post last week, I’ve been working on a transcription of Object 13 of The Four Zoas. After my revelation at DHSI, I decided to try encoding two basic transcriptions of the object in order to see how viewing it as an object or as a text changed my results – just as an experiment.

Digital Humanities, XML

DHSI and the Four Zoas: Part 1

15 October 2015

In June, I went to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, BC. I have a whole other post in my head about the ferry journey from Seattle to Victoria (beautiful!), the fish tacones at Red Fish Blue Fish (delicious!) and the nineteenth-century architecture of the city (magnificent!), but for now I’ll stick to the subject at hand: encoding the Four Zoas.

BAND, XML

OK With Unclear: Transcribing Difficult Texts

8 October 2014

In Rochester, we get a little caught up with transcription practices. It’s not [entirely] our fault. The Blakeians at UNC-Chapel Hill focus on Blake illustrations while the manuscript/language stuff gets sent up north. Blake’s often mystifying script surrounds us, and we have been charged (by God, sure) to transcribe our way out, into the promised land of textual clarity.

During this process, we think unreasonably hard about impossibly small details. Is that a period or a comma? (What is our policy on commas again?) Is that “d” really there? Am I seeing things? Wait, or did I read it?

If you ever wanted to bridge the gap between punctuation and existentialism, textual editing may be for you.