Corpora of correspondence material are not the sole interest of scholarly editors who may find the private letters from and to an author elucidating for questions on documentary, aesthetic, authorial, sociological, and bibliographic issues. Traditionally, letters have especially been of interest to a plethora of historical disciplines, and nowadays, on can imagine that (socio-)linguists or cultural sociologists may want to question a textbase of correspondence material diachronically, synchronically, chronologically, or topically. Letters, which Johan Wolfgang von Goethe classified amongst the most important monuments which the individual can leave behind, do provide exclusive insight in and contain valuable information about all sorts of private and public matters. Focusing on the scholarly edition, relevant correspondence material must be studied by the editor in his or her quest for bits of information on e.g. the writing or composing process of an author or a composer, the dating, meaning and reception of a work, or the biography of the author. And since studying implies reading and understanding, it could also implies transcribing and annotating, hence editing.

Since its start-up in 2000, the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Flanders (Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie - CTB) has been engaged actively in the editing, study, and valorisation of Flemish literary heritage. One of its key activities has been the scholarly editing of correspondence materials of Flemish authors and composers. Recently, this part of the research agenda of the CTB has gained new impetus with the start of the long-term DALF project. DALF is an acronym for Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders focusing on epistolary material by Flemish authors and composers of the 19th and 20th century. It is envisioned as a growing electronic textbase of correspondence material, the input of which will be provided by separate electronic edition projects. As this description indicates, the possibilities of electronic data storage, manipulation and distribution invite to broaden the conception of the scholarly edition as a standalone reference tool towards an integrated part of a textbase that is open to different uses, as well as to (future) electronic manipulation techniques. In this respect, we believe that the availability of a growing number of DALF editions can raise the importance of correspondence materials to its full potential with regards to the different facets of cultural heritage study. Once a substantial number of well-documented correspondence editions is electronically available, the DALF archive can be used to select different sub-editions along parameters that meet the needs of scholars in different research disciplines ranging from literary criticism to historical, diachronic, synchronic, and sociolinguistic research. Apart from new electronic edition projects, we expect that the DALF project will stimulate the international debate on electronic transcriptions and editions of manuscript materials. In order to ensure maximum flexibility and (re)usability of each of the electronic DALF editions, a formal framework is required that can guarantee uniform integration of new projects in the DALF archive. Therefore, the project aimed from its start at adherence to international standards for electronic text representation (XML) and text encoding (mainly TEI). The strong formalist character of these standards forced an in-depth evaluation of the specific character of letters as a document type, as well as of the aptness of those representational standards to capture these documentary characteristics. In general, the TEI encoding scheme provides an excellent starting point for many of the features one would like to encode in letters. Yet, it has a bias towards markup of texts as logical structures, and falls short in some respect of a detailed representation of physical aspects of primary sources of manuscript material. Additionally, the design of DALF as a textbase of correspondence material calls for more specific provisions to capture the indication of letter-specific and archival metadata, than those provided in the TEI scheme. Therefore, we took the TEI scheme as a basis from which we developed an extension module for the scholarly integer encoding of correspondence material. In doing so, we took into consideration the insights and practices presented in international projects like Master (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records) and MEP (Model Editions Partnership) for the implementation of following requirements in the DALF DTD:

  • First, the DTD should be designed for the transcription of primary source material, from which letter editions can be generated. In view of this requirement, the work by the Model Editions Partnership proved of little use, since it mainly aims at the digitisation of existing letter editions in print.
  • Second, the DTD should allow to store detailed metadata about the transcribed document. This is the point where Master proved useful.
  • Third, the DTD should be able to cater for letter-specific features, such as the envelope information, the postscript etc.
  • Fourth, the DTD should allow for a general application to letter transcriptions and editions and should not restrict itself to the specific corpus of letters we are currently working on.

In the paper we will focus on the theoretical foundations regarding the characteristics of letters as a document type, and their implementation in the DALF DTD. Further, we will demonstrate an instantiation of this technical framework in a first editorial DALF project of the CTB, namely the electronic edition of the correspondence between Stijn Streuvels and his Dutch and Flemish editors.

The draft guidelines and DTD's are available from the project's website: http://www.kantl.be/ctb/project/dalf/