Give me the XML and no one gets hurt

The American Verse Project sets out to digitize American poetry, mostly from the 18th century. The project is a collaboration between the University of Michigan Press and the Humanities Text Initiative, although the content of this project seems to be very much at the discretion of the editors. Admittedly, it would take a lot to put every bit of American verse in existence into an online archive. The list of included works has been "expanded to include poets of special interest" which sounds pretty subjective to me. If I was a scholar working with American poetry, I would be worried about whether or not the work I was looking for had made the cut and been included. Some 400 authors are currently included in the project - it's not a bad start. 

There's a lot of talk about TEI and the coding that has gone into the project so far. The focus is on thoroughness, on making the code as consistent, and therefore easily accessible, as possible. A whole paragraph on the American Verse Project website is dedicated to detailing just how accurate the American Verse Project strives to be, and how much they value the TEI guidelines. Fun fact: images are also included. So the project basically bypasses the challenge of having to find a way to encode images, though for the record I think this is a much better idea than trying to describe the illustrations with words.

What strikes me as odd is that for all the American Verse Project gets behind TEI with a lot of enthusiasm, the code itself is not available. Users can conduct detailed searches and browse the material within the project, but they cannot get "behind the screen." There is also a link to the TEI guidelines, which is not the same thing.

I found one other reference to the American Verse Project while searching the U of T catalogue, but it was (I kid you not) 99 words long and basically said what I said in the first paragraph of this blog, but shorter.

American verse project. (1998). Missouri Library World, 3(3), 29. Retrieved from 

           http://search.proquest.com/docview/235899126?accountid=14771

American Verse Project. Retrieved from: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/