A milestone!
Well, I’ve just sent off 1200 lines of the Bradshaw text, edited and XML encoded, to the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. I think I’m ordering take-away tonight.
This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.
Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge has presented its own particular demands at the encoding stage. The text is extremely ambitious in its historical range and scope – almost like a vast encyclopaedia of medieval Chester – and so there are a huge number of places, people and events which need marking up. All this information encoded within the text – searchable, linked to the other project texts and map, as well as other traditional print and digital materials – should mean that it’s a really rich resource. There’s still much more to do, finalising subject taxonomies and hierarchies, to ensure that all the project data is interlinked and organised in meaningful ways.
As a poet, Bradshaw hasn’t received a good press from critics in the past. But after my close work with the Life of St Werburge I’ve found some interesting stylistic features which I think are worthy of more discussion. I hope to share my thoughts on some of them via the blog in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I have a decision to make tonight: pizza, Chinese, or Indian?
Tags: Add new tag