Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading two new books which are directly relevant to our project research: Jane Laughton’s Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester, 1275-1520 and Robert Barrett’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656. I’m planning to share my thoughts on each of them here on the project blog. Today, I’m going to discuss my responses to Rob Barrett’s excellent book.
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.