Week 4: TEI and the Anglo-Saxon Charter Project

My apologies for this just-under-the-wire post.

My first instinct for learning TEI and other Digital Humanities tools was that "I CAN USE THIS TO ANNOTATE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS!" Of course, I did not have a clue how exactly you would do that. Fortunately, projects like the Anglo-Saxon Charter Project exist!

ASChart is a project out of King's College London (and some of my ex-colleagues from my MA work there, so shout out to London medievalists!) that aims to basically do an encoding challenge--but for all the Anglo-Saxon charters they can find.

As we have discussed in class, it is important to know exactly what you are marking up and why you are doing it. In the case of ASChart, they have chosen to do a 'diplomatic' encoding. Diplomatic is basically an a method of identifying common features of a set of documents--so in the case of charters, you will typically have an invocation, a dating clause, bounds, a curse, etc.

Here's what an Anglo-Saxon charter looks like in the wild:

Winchester College Hyde Abbey Charter

Courtesy of Project Woruldhord, University of Oxford

So, in this situation, one could choose to reproduce the "look" of this manuscript (the script, the spacing, the columns, etc) or one could choose to reproduce the content. That is what ASChart has done. If you look at this example, you can see that they have used their code (which they do not fully reveal but they do give you a technical breakdown of why they think TEI and XML is important) to identify parts of the piece, like "invocation."

From http://www.aschart.kcl.ac.uk/charters/s0001.html

The invocation, which is the first line, appears shaded. This doesn't look like a medieval manuscript, but it has the elements of one.  When looking at the XML, you can see that they have indeed tagged things by their function:

http://www.aschart.kcl.ac.uk/tech/tech_intro.html

Notice how the invocation is within <invocation> </invocation> tags. 

It is now easy to compare elements, identify common features, and deviations from the norm from Charter to charter, and with my new understanding of the rules of encoding that we read last week, I am able to appreciate it more.