I would have a look at the Text poartnership program of the EEBO project.
I'm not sure whether Hall/s Chronicle is on their list, but I'm sure it
would make a great addition if encoded in a compatible fashion with their
2,000 texts. At the least you could learn a lot from them about wht to
avoid.



-----Original Message-----
From: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Al Magary
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2003 1:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: note from a newbie


I thank Dan O'Donnell for the candid advice about avoiding TEI Lite.  I
don't know enough to totally appreciate the significance of that advice or
the alternative(s) he suggests, but in a few weeks, after I've browsed and
considered possibilities, I'll probably understand more.

Hall's Chronicle (1550), which covers the period 1399-1547, was a principal
source for Shakespeare's English history plays, and the Henry VIII chapter
is still regarded as a primary source for today's historians because Hall
was a contemporary.  The last full edition of the chronicle, in 1809, was
some kind of collation of the 1548 and 1550 editions.  (Libraries tend to
have the 1965 reprint of the 1809 edition.)

My intention is, first, to produce a diplomatic transcription of the 1550
edition, from the online facsimiles at Penn
(http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?
textID=halle&PagePosition=1 ).  For this phase, I am using a three-column
transcription table in MS Word:  one column for line numbers, central column
for Hall's text, last column for on-the-fly vocab glosses and notes.  I'd be
delighted to send an extract to anyone who's interested.

You have only to glance at a couple of the 1,334 pages (which were set in
blackletter) to realize that the spelling, punctuation, syntax, etc. are
remarkably inconsistent.  I've done about 2/3 of the transcription and so
far found only *six* lines that a modern typesetter would set the same way;
I found two sentences where one word ("Calais" and "most") are spelled three
different ways in the same sentence.  You can imagine how much text encoding
might be *possible.*  But the issue for me is how much encoding would be
useful for scholars of either Tudor history or early modern English.

My initial impulse was to produce the transcription, then a modern spelling
edition, and hyperlink by page number, at least, with the online facsimiles.
The modernized text would be somewhat repunctuated and reparagraphed or
formatted, to make browsing and searching easier.  The justification would
be this: As for example "Calais" is spelled a dozen different ways, the
historian can search for it easily in the modernized version, see what fits
his or her needs, then refer either to the facsimiles or the transcription
for the original wording.  But I suspect the literature/language scholar
might want to look at different aspects of the text.

The alternative would be a comprehensively encoded text in which all the
variations of "Calais" would get the same tags, not just as the standard
Calais but also as a French placename.  Is that about right?  If so, forgive
me for feeling a bit daunted.

OTOH I don't want my work to go to waste.

Any further thoughts on this would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Al Magary