Martin K. Foys wrote:
Dear DM's
I looking for a bit of an update on current initiatives for encoding medieval MSS with TEI or XML, and being out of the loop of such things recently, I have been having trouble figuring out what is, actually, still current and active.
I've know of a few from past and recent work (TEI workgroup Medieval Manuscript Description, the MARC initiative, the MASTER program, and of course, EPT), but what ones (those and others) should be considered as still active and working -- leading the charge, if you will, towards the markup of medieval MSS?
Hi Martin,
I would of course recommend using TEI P5 and its Manuscript Description module.[1] This is really the outcome of the most recent work, based on the work of the groups you note and provides some very good ways to record all the metadata one might about a manuscript.[2] That module, combined with the other innovations in others (like <choice> and <g>) which are a boon to the transcription of primary sources, means that if one was starting an edition of a manuscript, then this is what I'd choose. (In fact, what I have chosen for one I'm currently working on.)
-James
[1] See the text of the guidelines for this module at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/MS.html [2] There is an article on TEI's Manuscript Description module in the upcoming issue of the Digital Medievalist journal.