Week 4: British Women Romantic Poets Project

Since starting this course, I have become increasingly more interested in the digitization of older works - works include books, poems, manuscripts, and more. When faced with this week's blog task, I was pretty enthusiastic, since I have very limited experience with XML, including breaking it down into a readable format. 

I quickly found a topic and project that I found interesting: the British Women Romantic Poets Project. According to their website, their goal was to create an online scholarly archive consisting of poetry by Irish and British women during the Romantic period in English literary history. This project utilizes TEI in order to tag their texts. Now, they have made changes to standardize their procedures to allow their TEI headers to transform into MARC headings. All of this is done in the name of "interoperability".

Under the description of the project, it is identified that they follow the encoding practices based on the Victorian Women Writers' Project at Indiana. If the project had to implement any changes in the encoding practices, they made it clear in their Encoding Guidelines Manual. 

The project has been on-going for quite some time, so the style of encoding changed. Prior to 2007, texts were encodded in Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML). After that point, all texts were encoded using Extensible Markup Language (XML). And what a treat! This project allows visitors to see both the encoding as well as the HTML version of the text!

Frankland, Sarah.
Leaves of poesy, original and selected. 1838.
XML

For someone with virtually no experience with encoding, being able to do a split screen between the XML and HTML versions of the same work helped me to better understand what is being encoded. It's all fine and well to read about the theories, and see the lists of tags, but to physically see the influence these tags have on the work themselves is very helpful. I'm hoping that with continued exposure (and perhaps even some hands-on experience) will allow me to understand not only items in the text that require encoding, but to grasp what XML if for.

Frankland, Sarah.
Leaves of poesy, original and selected. 1838.
HTML

I will definitely be keeping these examples in my back pocket as we head into the Encoding Challenge, and draw up to our final project.

Taken from the home page of
The British Women Romantic Poets Project

Links:

Check out the British Women Romantic Poets Project! 

TEI: Projects: I found this interesting example of the project through the TEI: Projects page. Maybe you will find something interesting there, too!