Dan wrote:
I've had a couple of off line responses to my question about a
primer.
This might be a good opportunity for participants at all
levels of
expertise to mention the types of thing they wish they knew
(had known)
in starting or completing various projects.
I'm showing up at this fancy dress ball in bib overalls, chewing on a piece of hay, with anecdotes about having a whole heap o' ___ back on the farm...
I've just finished a conservative diplomatic transcription of Hall's Chronicle based on the facsimiles of the 1550 ed. online at Penn. 700,000 words of Hall, about half now annotated and most of the vocab glossed; it prints out at 1,600 pp. Yes, there are things I wish I had done, and now must do retroactively, without the speed and flexibility allowed during keyboarding.
I designed a nice page-table in Word and did the transcription line by line (this will make proofreading, crossreferencing, etc. easy). A second column has notes.
Now, just to sample my wish list: --I wish I had marked suspected typos as I might correct these and put a list in an annex. (It's not easy to spot a typo when there are a dozen different spellings used for various words, but after a while you can say with some certainty, Hall never spelled it *that* way.)
--I wish I had marked text in Latin, proverbs and biblical quotes, and mentions of the stuff of everyday life, like games.
OK, I guess I would have coded a Latin phrase something like <lq>quid pro quo</lq>
What I find mystifying is what happens *then*? In other words, what's the use of that? Suppose I wanted to pull out all the Latin quotes to give to a starving Latin student to translate. Who or what even locates all the <lq> coded text, much less does anything with it? If a user approached my etext and asked himself, "I wonder how much Latin is in Hall," how would the coding help? How do I as the author tell a user, "I put a lot of fancy coding into Hall, so just press _____ and bingo!"
TEI-L subscribers may know I've had this conceptual block for some time. Maybe it's psychological, not wanting to learn a new foreign language. Or maybe I just don't relate TEI theory to my practice.
Cheers, Al Magary