If it is true that transcribing and encoding the text are acts of editing which cannot be left to an encoder who is no textual scholar, or as Michael Sperberg-McQueen has noted: ′a final division of labor between scholar and encoder [...] would, taken literally, absolve researchers from any responsibility for the quality, intelligence, or utility of the encodings they create-a worrisome state of affairs.′ (Sperberg-McQueen 1991: 36), and that encoding cannot be done objectively without imposing ones theory on the text on a machine readable transcription, then the markup language used should enable the transcriber/encoder/editor to do what s/he wants to do. With respect to older texts, this has already been done successfully using the TEI encoding scheme, but a modern author is not a scribe. Modern manuscript material excels in the documentation of the complexity of the dynamic genetic process, for which new encoding strategies are needed. At the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie - CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Gent, Belgium (Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde) a couple of new electronic editing projects have been initiated for which machine readable transcriptions of modern manuscript materials are a sine qua non. Even so for the electronic edition of the Finnegan's Wake Notebooks which is prepared at the James Joyce centre of the University of Antwerp (UIA) in close cooperation with the CTB.

This session will focus on these new encoding strategies developed in the respective projects which will be introduced, and will call for an thorough revision/extension of the TEI encoding schemes.

Reference
Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. (1991), Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with examples from Medieval Texts. In: Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6/1 (1991), 34-46.

Het seminarie bestaat uit 3 papers, respectievelijk:

  • Edward Vanhoutte: Texts and Transcriptions: mapping scribal complexities onto a line of text. [Abstract]
  • Vincent Neyt: On the Advantages and Disadvantages of XSLT for Manuscript Transcription. [Abstract]
  • Joke Debusschere & Ron Van den Branden: Stretching the TEI for the transcription of corpora of modern correspondence. [Abstract]

Het seminarie wordt in het Engels gegeven. Vragen kunnen in het Nederlands worden gesteld.