Creating a Digital Edition with TEI

Background

To get experience using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) styled XML I studied two online courses. This post presents the results of creating a TEI styled digital edition. I choose Lord George Digby’s third speech to the House of Commons as the source of my digital edition.

Research Question

Identify an out of copyright document and prepare a digital edition of it using XML. Create a Data Management Plan addressing the questions:

• Is the project data management in line with the institutional data management policy?
• Are there any ethical or legal considerations?
• What methodologies will be used to create the data?
• What types of data? Why did you choose these types?
• How will data be stored in the short term?
• How will data be shared in the long term?
• Have all the proper people been consulted?

Data Management Plan

Is it in line with the institutional data management policy?

N/A

Are there any ethical or legal considerations?

The Folger Shakespeare Library licenses the content on Folger websites under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://www.folger.edu/copyright-policy

What methodologies will be used to create the data?

The text will be transcribed manually from the image into a TEI-based XML document.

What types of data? Why did you choose these types?

Original source image in JPG. Source images were already in JPG format.
Transcription TEI-based XML. Chosen to allow metadata to be captured within the document along with the transcription.
Research notes in Markdown. Allows notes to moved easily, for example, into this post.

How will data be stored in the short term?

Data is stored locally and backed up to cloud-based storage. The website data is stored in a cloud-hosted, version-controlled GIT repository.

How will data be shared in the long term?

Hosted on the website, https://dh-by.me.

Have all the proper people been consulted?

N/A

Manuscript Source

I choose two printed pages from the Folger Library as my manuscript source. The details are:

*Digital Image File Name* 155927  
*Source Call Number* L.f.151  
*Source Title* Bristol, George Digby, Earl of, 1612-1677. The third speech of the Lord George Digby to the House of Commons, concerning bishops, and the citie petition, the 9th of Febr. 1640 1640 [i.e. 1641]  
*Physical Description* leaf A1 verso (page 2) || leaf A2 recto (page 3)  
*Digital Image Type* FSL collection  

Source URL

*Digital Image File Name* 155928  
*Source Call Number* L.f.151  
*Source Title* Bristol, George Digby, Earl of, 1612-1677. The third speech of the Lord George Digby to the House of Commons, concerning bishops, and the citie petition, the 9th of Febr. 1640 1640 [i.e. 1641]  
*Physical Description* leaf A2 verso (page 4) || leaf A3 recto (page 5)  
*Digital Image Type* FSL collection  

Source URL

Results

My digital edition TEI XML documents are published here and here.

Conclusions

Dealing with copyright has been an important aspect of creating the digital edition. I choose the Folger Shakespeare Library sources as the copyright was appropriate and easy to understand.

Presentation of the TEI styled XML document requires the use of an appropriate application. I choose the TEI Boilerplate. It is a lightweight solution for publishing TEI P5 styled content directly in modern browsers. My post here describes how I integrated TEI Boilerplate with this website so the TEI XML files can be served directly to the web without server-side processing or translation to HTML.

Acknowledgement

This post outlines the creation of a digital edition based on an assignment I completed as I studied the Digital Editions practical training course taught by Emma Huber, Taylor Institution Library, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

I supplemented my knowledge on the use of TEI by studying Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts and TEI Encoding taught by Marjorie Burghart, French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Elena Pierazzo, University of Tours.