Chapter 13. Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscript

This chapter of our documentation is still in beta. We welcome feedback, corrections, and questions while we finalize the page in our 2024–2025 work cycle.

Introduction to Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscripts

Prior Reading

Rationale

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 Preface 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?

Further Reading

Some useful external resources about encoding manuscripts in TEI include:
Burghart, Marjorie, ed. Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition with the Text Encoding Initiative, [Digital Editing of Medieval Texts: A Textbook]. https://www.digitalmanuscripts.eu/digital-editing-of-medieval-texts-a-textbook/
Burghart, Marjorie, and Elena Pierazzo. Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts, and TEI Encoding. DARIAH. https://teach.dariah.eu/course/view.php?id=32
Flanders, Julia, Syd Baumann, et al. Manuscripts and the TEI Primer. Women Writer’s Project. https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/resources/ms_encoding.html
Useful resources on manuscript drama and dramatic paratexts in general include:
Purkiss, James. Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text
Long, William.
Werstine
Ioppollo
Stern, Documents of Performance
Estill, Dramatic Extracts

Encode Hand

The @hand attribute can be added to all the elements in att:written that we have in our schema1, plus the <stage> element. In a LEMDO transcription of a manuscript, the elements to which you will most often add @hand are:
<del>
<add>
<stage>
LEMDO maintains a centralized database of manuscript hands in a file called HAND1.xml. You will have to prepare and submit a <handnote> for each of the hands in your manuscript. The LEMDO team will add it to HAND1.xml for you. In the following example for the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project, both <handNote> element are grouped together in a parent <handNotes> element, which has an @xml:id value beginning with HAND1_ and concluding with a signifier (usually the id of the edition) that helps identify the manuscript. Each <handnote> element has an @xml:id value of DOUH# (DOUH + a number). This xml:id will be used in the transcription of the manuscript to indicate the different hands.
<handNotes xml:id="HAND1_DOUAI">
  <handNote xml:id="DOUH1">
    <p>The primary scribal hand used in the Douai MS, which is MS 787 in the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore repository.</p>
  </handNote>
  <handNote xml:id="DOUH2">
    <p>The secondary scribal hand used in the Douai MS, which is MS 787 in the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore repository. This hand is responsible primarily for the insertion of stage directions. This hand is smaller, thinner and more slanting, and does not appear in <title level="m">Macbeth</title>.</p>
  </handNote>
</handNotes>
Once the hand has been added and given an xml:id, here is how you will use the attribute. In these 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).
<ab><!-- transcription -->
  <del hand="hand:DOUH1">Macbeth</del>
  <add hand="hand:DOUH2">Macduff</add>
  <!-- transcription continues -->
</ab>
<speaker>
  <del hand="hand:DOUH1">S</del>
  <add hand="hand:DOUH2" rend="overwritten">M</add>es:</speaker>
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:
<speaker>
  <del>S</del>
  <add rend="overwritten">M</add>es:</speaker>
In this example, we have a stage direction added in a second hand:
<stage hand="hand:DOUH2">Enter Romeo</stage>

Notes

1.As of 2021-10-14, we use the following elements from att:written: <lem> , <rdg> , <add> , <del> , <ab> , <closer> , <div> , <figure> , <fw> , <head> , <hi> , <label> , <note> , <opener> , <p> , <seg> , <signed> , and <text> , <trailer> .

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Laura Estill

Laura Estill is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she directs the digital humanities centre. Her monograph (Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays, 2015) and co-edited collections (Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn, 2016 and Early British Drama in Manuscript, 2019) explore the reception history of drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from their initial circulation in print, manuscript, and on stage to how we mediate and understand these texts and performances online today. Her work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Humanities, and The Seventeenth Century, as well as in collections such as Shakespeare’s Theatrical Documents, Shakespeare and Textual Studies, and The Shakespeare User. She is co-editor of Early Modern Digital Review.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

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