There are multiple ways to encode manuscripts (and, indeed, all documents) in TEI. LEMDO encoding recommends semi-diplomatic manuscript transcriptions that follow the DRE Editorial Guidelines. As the notes, these guidelines are not prescriptive about the length and scope of critical paratexts and/or annotations, the inclusion of contextual materials, or modernization guidelines. These, and other decisions, are made by the anthology lead and encoding team. At present, LEMDO does not support parallel transcription (outlined in 11.2.1 of the TEI Guidelines), that is, transcription that directly points to a location on a facsimile page.

When encoding a manuscript play for LEMDO, the emphasis is on the transcribed text, the scholarly apparatus, and the value it offers for readers. As the DRE Editorial Guidelines ask: What are you editing towards? Who are you editing for?

By the time you have worked through this chapter, you will:

Some useful external resources about encoding manuscripts in TEI include:

Useful resources on manuscript drama and dramatic paratexts in general include:

Our objective for naming manuscripts is to make the file names consistent, short, and informative. This documentation will explain LEMDO’s standard practice to ensure that our semi-diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript playbooks meet that objective.

The protocol for file names for semi-diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript texts is to use emd (following LEMDO conventions for early modern drama), a short form of the play title, underscore, then a code for the repository in which the manuscript is held. A template of this file name would be: emd[playID]_[repositorycode].xml.

Check DRE Play IDs to see if the play already has a shortened form. If it does not, confer with your anthology lead about an appropriate shortened form then confirm with the LEMDO team that this shortened form is suitable for processing.

See Library Codes for a list of abbreviations for repositories. If your repository is not listed in that file, please contact the LEMDO team and ask them to add the repository.

If your repository holds more than one full-text manuscript of the same play, differentiate them with numbers as follows: emdJoc_BL1.xml and emdJoc_BL2.xml.

For instance, the file name for an encoding of a British Library manuscript of Jocasta is emdJoc_BL.xml.

LEMDO uses the <msDesc> (manuscript description) element to provide readers with information about the source manuscript. This includes information about where the manuscript is held and what the manuscript contains along with a physical description of the manuscript.

Different manuscripts will have different kinds of information available about them to encode: for instance, not all manuscripts can be dated with precision; provenance information might be unclear, the scribe might be unknown. Furthermore, not all editions will encode all information about a given manuscript: for instance, it is up to the editors how much codicographical or paleographical information will be given. You will work with your anthology lead to determine what information will be the most use for readers of the edition to encode. We recommend that the information about manuscripts be primarily in a textual essay in a separate file, in keeping with other LEMDO practices; this essay would then be available to readers in the textual introduction.

The manuscript description is part of your file’s source description. To encode this, add an <msDesc> element as a child of your <sourceDesc> element.

You will use the <msIdentifier> (manuscript identifier) element to capture key information about where your source manuscript is located. To encode the manuscript identifier, add the <msIdentifier> element as a child of the <msDesc> element. Add appropriate child elements to the <msIdentifier> element to capture key information about the location of your source manuscript:

To encode the information, follow these steps:

A sample manuscript identifier would look like this:

We recommend not abbreviating the names of collections in <idno> ; that is, use MS English poetry rather than, for instance, MS Eng. poet. Note: the placement of the abbreviation MS can vary according to repository (for instance, sometimes people cite BL Add. MS and sometimes people cite BL MS Add. for manuscripts in the British Library’s Additional collection); we recommend being consistent within anthologies.

Following the manuscript identification in the header, encoders can choose to describe the contents of a manuscript using the <msContents> element, which contains at least one <msItem> element. Some manuscripts will have only one item (say, a play); others, like British Library Egerton MS 1994, will have multiple items beyond a single play. It is up to the editor and anthology lead how much detail to include in <msContents> .

Here is a sample of how the first plays of BL Egerton MS 1994 would be encoded.

The physical description of a manuscript appears in the <physDesc> element. It is not required to offer a physical description of a manuscript, and each anthology lead will decide the level of granularity of information they wish to offer. If you and your anthology lead decide that it is appropriate to add a physical description, you will add the <physDesc> as a child of <msDesc> .

Information that can appear in the physical description includes, for instance, a description of the support (paper, vellum, etc), watermarks, foliation, and/or condition. Currently, LEMDO does not use the full TEI tagset for describing manuscripts, so the information is offered in prose. This prose can appear in <p> tags:

Many LEMDO editors, including DRE editors, will choose to prepare a textual essay to accompany their text. We recommend following the DRE guidelines on the textual essay and including the relevant information (for instance, provenance, relation of your manuscript to other sources, binding, hands/scribes, and other information about the material text).

LEMDO uses the @hand attribute to signify which hand wrote pieces of manuscript plays. The @hand attribute can be added to all the elements in the TEI’s att:written attribute class that we have in our schema¹. In a LEMDO transcription of a manuscript, the elements to which you will most often add @hand are:

The @hand attribute points to an entry in LEMDO’s centralized database of manuscript hands (the Handography, or HAND1.xml). You must prepare an entry for each hand in your manuscript using the <handNote> element. Once you have prepared your entries, send them to the LEMDO team to be added to the Handography.

For information about how to prepare Handography entries and the structure of the HAND1.xml file, see Handography (HAND1).

To indicate a change in hand, add the @hand attribute on the element that was written in the new hand. For example, if a stage direction was added by a new hand, put the @hand attribute on the <stage> element. Give the @hand attribute a value of hand: followed by the xml:id for the hand that you wish to indicate. For example, <stage hand="hand:HHHH1">.

In both of the first two examples, Hand 2 deletes material from Hand 1 and adds something new. Hand 1 wrote Macbeth. Hand 2 deleted it and added Macduff:

Additional attributes allow you to say how the deletion/addition was achieved (e.g., by overwriting or by inserting):

If the same hand deletes a transcription error and then overwrites it, encode as follows. There is no need to indicate the hand because it does not change:

In this example, we have a stage direction added in a second hand:

When encoding insertions, you can encode the placement of the insertion using the @place attribute and values from our placement taxonomy. You can also encode the hand, if known, of the insertion.

Manuscript additions include anything that seems to have been inserted in the text after it was originally written. This could be something that the original scribe changed or added later. It could also be an insertion by a later hand. Encode all manuscript additions using the <add> element.

The following example shows the original manuscript compiler adding a word above the line: Sometimes, when adding an insertion or completing a line that is too long for the page, a manuscript compiler inserts a caret or an arrow to indicate where the insertion goes. You can indicate an upward pointing caret (^) using the g_caret glyph (see Keyboard Shortcuts and Special Characters).

The following example shows a caret added below the line to point to text added above the line (in this case, added by a second hand):

The following example shows a caret added above the line next to a textual addition by a second hand:

Additions can be as short as a single letter: As the placement taxonomy notes, for manuscript encoding, use your judgment about the placement of an addition and what constitutes, for instance, the margin of a page.

Wrap all deletions in the <del> element. Within the <del> element, you can indicate that the text deleted is illegible: Gap is only used to encode material that has not been transcribed.

If, however, you can read the deleted text, type the text that has been erased, struck through, or otherwise deleted: Note that in the above example, the original scribe has struck out a repeated word.

You can use the <unclear> element to indicate a stretch of text that is partially legible: In the above example, the transcriber is guessing that the struck out word is three.

Some reasons for using <unclear> include deletions and illegible writing.

Sometimes a deletion will be paired with an insertion. In TEI, these are nested in a <subst> element:

The above example shows a second hand writing over a word in the original manuscript.

As with all other additions, you can indicate the hand if it is not the hand of the main scribe; you can also indicate the place of the addition.

If material is superscripted inside added material (i.e., superscripted with respect to other letters in the added material), encode as follows: This encoding allows us to capture the fact that the “e” is superscripted in the added material, relative to the “y”.

For commonplace markers in the shape of inverted commas, we encourage compilers to simply type them where they appear in the manuscript, using single or double apostrophes or commas as appropriate. In the example above, the final three lines are prefaced by commonplace markers.

For text that is underlined, use the @rend attribute on a <seg> element: At this point, we are unable to differentiate between hands on underlines.

Encode manicules and other marginal drawings using the <figure> tag. See Encode Title Page of Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions for encoding practice and LEMDO’s controlled list of allowed values on the @type attribute of the <figure> element.

Currently, the default rendering for <figure> is centred; adding a @place attribute will override the default.

Note: the @hand attribute can be used on <figure> if it is clear who drew the image.

For a drawing on the page (encoded using either the value illustration or portrait on the @type attribute), you must use the <figDesc> element to briefly describe the drawing.