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part1-ms.xml
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<div xml:id="part1-ms" xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<head>The Ancrene Wisse</head>
<p>This chapter discuss an implementation of an electronic manuscript
edition for the Early English Text Society (EETS)<note place="foot">See <ptr
target="http://www.tei-c.org/Projects/EETS/"/></note>. This is one of
the oldest-established British learned societies in the field of
medieval studies, which has been publishing well-respected primary
editions of medieval materials since its founding in the mid-19th
century. Consequently, the EETS has accumulated a long list of print
editions of scarce resources, which it would be of considerable
interest retrospectively to digitize. </p>
<p>In 2003, Dr Bella Willet was awarded a small AHRB research grant to
investigate the feasibility of transforming a typical print EETS
edition into a digital resource. The text chosen, the <title>Ancrene
Wisse</title>, is a well known Middle English <q>rule</q> or
<q>guide</q> for female recluses, composed in the West Midlands in
the early thirteenth century. Dobson's edition of this text,
published by EETS in 1976, was adopted as a starting point for the
project. This edition contained introductory notes, and a traditional
apparatus derived from a collation of selected sources, but no images or
transcription of those sources. The <title>Ancrene Wisse</title>
is a substantial prose text, surviving in four different manuscripts;
for this pilot, we worked only with the preface, for which digitized
page images of each manuscript were obtained and transcribed. The
material in the original edition was revised and further augmented by
these images, and also by a diplomatic transcription of each
manuscript version, as well as a translation of the edited copy text,
a glossary, and detailed interpretive and analytic notes. </p>
<p>All of this material, it was agreed, should be integrated for
delivery over the web, thus providing much more than the typical
scholarly edition in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The
material would all be stored as TEI XML, but converted to HTML for
the convenience of current generation web browsers.</p>
<p>The components of the edition are organized and encoded in such a
way as to facilitate the automatic definition and processing of links
between the various components. More specifically, it is possible to
present on the screen corresponding parts of a text in different
manuscript versions, in both page images and diplomatic transcript,
and in the edited text. Similarly, it is necessary to align text and
translation, to associate entries in the bibliography or notes with
discussion elsewhere in the text. All this linking was represented
using the ID/IDREF mechanism of XML, which meant that we had to define
XML elements for every text component that might potentially be
aligned in this way.</p>
<p>The structure proposed for this EETS pilot e-edition may be
summarised as follows. The entire edition is tagged as a single
<gi>TEI.2</gi> element, containing (as usual) a <gi>teiHeader</gi>
followed by a <gi>text</gi> element. The <gi>teiHeader</gi> contains
descriptive metadata for the entire edition, (including details of any
codes used in more than one of its components such as manuscript hand
identifiers). The <gi>text</gi> element groups together, at the top
level, the following:
<list type="ordered">
<item>front matter for the whole edition, tagged <gi>front</gi>,
containing all the introductory material;</item>
<item> a <gi>group</gi> element, containing a number of <gi>text</gi>
elements, each containing a distinct version of the text in question,
possibly with its own front and back matter; </item>
<item>back matter for the whole edition, tagged <gi>back</gi>,
containing sections of bibliography, analytic notes, glossary,
and index.
</item>
</list>
</p>
<p>By <soCalled>text</soCalled> above, we meant a number of distinct
things. Specifically, we wished to distinguish the following types:
<list type="gloss">
<label>edited</label><item>An edited text</item>
<label>translated</label><item>A translated text</item>
<label>mss</label><item>A group of transcriptions</item>
<label>text-trans</label><item>An aligned virtual text</item>
</list>
</p>
<p>By <soCalled>virtual</soCalled> text, we mean here a text that is
to be generated automatically from others. For example, we wished to display text
and translation as a single text, aligned at paragraph breaks; since
the whole document was generated as a series of static web pages, we
needed to include some element to indicate where this aligned version
was to be generated.</p>
<p>Within each text component, the <gi>div</gi> element was used to
mark further subdivisions. The TEI <gi>divGen</gi> element was used to
mark where <soCalled>virtual</soCalled> subdivisons are
to be generated, for example for divisions comprising links to page
images, or to manuscript descriptions. </p>
<p>To simplify the encoding of the diplomatic transcriptions, we made
a number of small modifications. We removed a large number of
elements which we had no need of. We introduced new elements, chiefly convenience
shortcuts such as <gi>lat</gi> (for <gi>foreign lang="lat"</gi>) or
<gi>fr</gi> (for <gi>foreign lang="fr"</gi>) etc. We also introduced
specialised pointing elements such as <gi>pp</gi>, used in the same
way as the standard <gi>ptr</gi> element, but with the added
constraint that its target should be a <gi>p</gi> element. And we
introduced an element <gi>page</gi>, modelled on the TEI <gi>ab</gi>
element, to delimit all the text on a given page.</p>
<p>From these modifications, we generated a project-specific DTD using
the TEI Pizza chef tool<note place="foot"><ptr
target="http://www.tei-c.org/pizza.html"/>. At TEI P5, a much improved
TEI schema builder called Roma is available, which amongst other
enhancements facilitates the generation of project-specific
documentation. </note> and used it to validate the XML components of
the new edition. Note that, with these additional elements, we were
able to represent both conflicting hierarchic views of the text: in
the transcript texts, each page is a block (<gi>page</gi>) , with the
boundaries of paragraphs represented by empty pointing elements
(<gi>pp</gi>); in the edited texts, each paragraph is a single block
(<gi>p</gi>), with the page boundaries represented by empty pointing
elements (<gi>pb</gi>). This symmetry of treatment turned out to
simplify considerably the creation of XSLT stylesheets for the task of
rendering combined views of the whole set of texts as static HTML
pages, which was our remaining task.</p>
<p>Constraints of time and funding did not enable us to treat all the
components of this edition as fully as might have been desired: for
example, we were not able to include full TEI-conformant descriptions
of the manuscripts themselves, nor were we able to transform the
glossary provided into an integrated lexicon, or to provide more than
a rudimentary text searching component. Nevertheless, the exercise
demonstrated the overall viability of the TEI approach as a means of
producing a sophisticated electronic product, capable of supporting
the demands of traditional philology.</p>
</div>