About the Project

This project has stretched over five years and has seen multiple stages and changes in practices, and is still a work in progress. Below is an outline of the principles and practices that have guided the project, but our most up-to-date practices can be found in our documentation. For further detail about the project's history, its development, and the many questions and discussions it has generated across the project team, see the Project's CV.

NB: As of version 1.0.0, users may find that the encoding of some items is less complete or up-to-date, or that transcriptions require further proofreading, particularly in volumes 7 through 10. Any questions or concerns about the website can be directed to the Project Director.

Organizational Principles

Given the scope and scale of the Lyon in Mourning manuscript, the project has taken an iterative approach to organizing and encoding the documents. Each item mostly corresponds with the headings provided by Forbes in the tables of contents for each volume. However, there are some points of divergence, particularly where Forbes has given a collective heading to multiple items, or where the table of contents has more than one heading (usually to identify a topic of special interest) for a single item; for the sake of accurate representation of metadata and ease of navigation, in such cases we have decided what is or is not a discrete item according to in situ cues. However, many items in the Lyon in Mourning are irreducibly complex in their composite and multimedia nature (e.g., letters within letters, or poems within letters), and we hope to produce more granular metadata in future iterations of the project.

Process

The initial scaffolding of the project was taken by collating the Index created by Steuart of Allanton against the Table of Contents from Paton’s 19th century edition. Entries were then de-duplicated and cross-referenced with the pages at which they exist in both the manuscript and Paton’s edition. Individual TEI files were created from each entry.

Research assistants then completed an initial pass across all files to add metadata detailing genre, correspondence information (using the TEI’s <correspDesc> and related elements), as well as project specific customizations. Given the uncertainty of further funding, the project sought to compile information about people, places, significant objects, and media within the project’s metadata (rather than encoding in situ). Following some initial experimentation with automated HTR workflows, the project transcribed all documents by hand, using a mix of Google Docs (for initial collaborative transcription) and transcribing and encoding directly into TEI in oXygen XML Editor.

Encoding Description

For more detailed information on our practices for encoding, see the project’s documentation.

All of our documents are encoded using a customization of the Text Encoding Initiative’s P5 schema. While the texts follow within the parameters of the TEI’s P5 Guidelines, the project represents an “unclean” modification of the TEI such that new elements are added within the TEI’s namespace. While the document’s metadata is still a work-in-progress,

<noteMarker>: Denotes an anchoring point for notes, which are encoded where they occur on the page (rather than embedded or inline). The noteMarker points to a specific note, and may be converted into a <ref> with an embedded <g>.

<NB>: A specific kind of segment for Forbes, nota benes appear both within the main text as well as within footnotes. Given that these represent a specific case of textual division (usually, but not always, attributable to Forbes), the project created this element for the sake of convenience. It may be converted equivalently to a note with multiple paragraphs.

<rule>: Denotes a horizontal rule, which is usually (but not always) an indicator of some sort of structural break. For the sake of convenience, we created the <rule> element, but this could be cleanly converted to <milestone> with a @rendition; we reserve <milestone> for editorially added/supplied milestones for dividing items.

Languages

In earlier stages of encoding, Scots words (which may or may not have been tagged with an @xml:lang value of "sco") were sometimes regarded as irregularities in spelling, and were regularized into common English spellings for the benefit of the website’s word-search function (see below on our approach to regularization). It was later realized that this approach risked replicating an unfortunate, centuries-long practice of treating Scots as divergent or incorrect English, rather than as a distinct language. We accordingly updated our practices to retain the original spelling of Scots vocabulary, although regrettably some sections with less complete or up-to-date encoding may still include unmarked and regularized Scots. Because our team at this stage does not include any Scots speakers, we recognize that this effort is likely imperfect, and we welcome feedback and corrections. Scots and English share much vocabulary, and we have only marked words and meanings that are unique to the Scots language (not alternative spellings for shared words, unless those spellings indicate distinctly Scottish pronunciation, e.g. “hous”); this is not intended to imply that shared words and meanings are English rather than Scots. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Scots, we have provided editorial notes with English-language glosses. We have not glossed Scots words that are either commonly known (e.g. laird, kilt, bairn), or that are close enough in sound and meaning to be understood by readers of English (e.g. gie, hae, auld).

Entity Tagging

People, places, organizations, and events (i.e., dates) have been tagged for reference, the results of which are compiled in the “Networks” section of the website. Consult the documentation for more information about our practices.

Editorial Declaration

Hyphenation

All end-of-line hyphens have been retained. Hyphens representing “weak” hyphens (i.e. non-word-separating) have been encoded using the <pc> element with @force="weak", with its parent word encoded using a <w> element.

Interpretation

Most interpretive tagging within the collection has been done through the use of editorial footnotes. Some tagging of themes has been included, but these are not surfaced in the output.

Normalization

The project has retained all original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and other idiosyncrasies of the text. Any corrections have been treated as normalization of original spelling (e.g. using <orig> and <reg>) or as expansions of abbreviations (e.g. using <abbr> and <expan>). The <sic> tag is used only where regularizations are not appropriate and is used without <corr>.

While Forbes went to great lengths to represent the visual idiosyncrasies of his written sources, amounting to what might be called a manuscript facsimile, our display does not attempt to fully capture the layout and appearance of the manuscript.

Punctuation

All original punctuation has been retained. Punctuation is encoded externally to the parent element.

Quotation

All quotation marks have been retained. Quotations and quotation marks have not been encoded.