Playing with the Guidelines: Topics in Text Encoding at the Women Writers Project

Playing with the Guidelines: Topics in Text Encoding at
the Women Writers Project

Syd
Bauman
Women Writers Project Brown University

Erica
Dillon
Women Writers Project Brown University

Julie
Desjardins
Women Writers Project Brown University

Julia
Flanders
Women Writers Project Brown University
Julia_Flanders@brown.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The TEI Guidelines are intended to be very broad, covering the encoding of all
but the most unusual documents for any of a variety of purposes. Furthermore,
the TEI very wisely provides a mechanism for extending or modifying the DTDs
used to enforce the SGML encoding, thus allowing "for texts that cannot be
conveniently or appropriately encoded using what is provided" (P3, pg. 737).
These unforeseen needs have already cropped up frequently since the TEI was
first published, and they have spurred the ongoing research of the TEI community
in addressing these issues, and in considering which merit changes to TEI itself
and which are simply local idiosyncrasies.
The Women Writers Project has often found it necessary to make extensive use of
the TEI extension mechanism in order to encode features in a way which
accurately represents their structure. In addition, we have found it useful to
specify a fuller and more explicit method of encoding rendition than is
described in TEI. This poster session will present several specific challenges
which the WWP has encountered in encoding early printed books, and the approach
we have taken in addressing them. We will describe our system of rendition
ladders, which allow an explicit pairing of keywords and values within the rend=
attribute provided by TEI. We will also describe our approach to encoding
headings and labels, notes, cast lists, and quotations that cuase overlap
problems, along with the specific TEI extensions we have made in support of our
methods.