Week 4: Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes

For this week's topic, I found a TEI project hosted by the Université François-Rabelais in Tours, France. The Virtual Humanist Libraries, or Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, specialize in digitized Renaissance books from all over France and elsewhere in Europe. They've got a large selection of letters and books by philosopher, essayist and all-around cool dude Michel de Montaigne so I was very pleased to stumble upon this project! In addition to digitized prints, manuscripts, and documents, the BVH has transcribed French and Latin texts. They also provide access to TEI-encoded files along with a bit of background on the Text Encoding Initiative. 

Complete list of XML documents

BVH provides links to their own updated XML coding guides (accessible online or as a pdf). According to their page, their goal is to help users publish online texts produced from the beginnings of moveable type to the 19th century. Their guide uses basic TEI principles but focuses on the representation of specific elements of Renaissance texts including pagination, illustrations, and special typographical elements or characters. 

Here's an example of the guide, which shows an original scanned document, the desired transcription, and the coding needed to achieve this. 

Original print and transcribed digital selections 

XML version 

The guide then breaks down the XML to explain its components, as well as TEI standards in general. Overall, I was surprised by how much of their back-end or behind the scenes work is displayed and shared, not only in terms of coding but also regarding the production of digital facsimiles.  The website is easy to use and accessible to those of us who are new to coding, or who might not even realize what goes into making e-archives and other digital humanities projects. The only drawback with this website and its TEI guide is that they are only available in French. This makes sense given the focus on French authors but could be useful to humanities scholars all over the world.

Check out BVH at http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/ and take a look through their guide here.