14.0755 Medieval Manuscript Transcription program & guidelines

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: Tue Mar 20 2001 - 01:29:41 EST

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 755.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

             Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 06:25:28 +0000
             From: cbf@socrates.Berkeley.EDU
             Subject: Medieval Manuscript Transcription program and guidelines

    Some of you may know that the Digital Scriptorium project at Berkeley and
    Columbia has been working on guidelines and a Document Type Definition
    (DTD) for the transcription of medieval manuscripts. A beta version
    written by Michael Sperberg-McQueen was presented at a workshop at
    Berkeley in the summer of 1999. We now have another version with more
    complete guidelines, which are designed to work with a text editor called
    NoteTab. We are very grateful to David Seamn (U. of Virginia) for this
    version.

    If you are interested in helping us test these material, or if you would
    like to try them out for use in your own projects, they are now available
    at the Digital Scriptorium address given below:

    http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium/transcription.html

    This can also be accessed directly from the Digital Scriptorium home page
    as well.

    Please feel to forward this message to any other relevant lists.

    Questions we are interested in:

    (1) Do the Guide and DTD "work" for practicing medievalists? Specifically,
    is the Guide good enough to be more-or-less self-explanatory? If you are
    _not_ familiar with the Text Encoding Initiative, HTML, or XML encoding,
    you should probably read through the introduction to the Guide fairly
    carefully, particularly with regard to the information to be supplied in
    the Header tag.

    (2) Is the Notetab program user-friendly enough so that transcribers can
    get started with a minimum of outside help and training? (Please note that
    NoteTab is Windows-based software).

    When you download the NoteTab program you should be able to extract it by
    clicking on the zip file and then on the setup.exe file in order to
    install it. Once it is installed save the ds2.clb file as indicated on the
    web page.

    I have gone through this basic process and it works. When you open
    NoteTab, you will find a set of captions at the bottom of the screen. When
    you click on "ds2" a menu opens on the left of the screen. To insert any
    tag or set of tags into your document, simply click on them. If there are
    parameters, a popup window will allow you to add them. E.g., if your text
    is divided into chapters, the <div1> you should call the tag type
    "chapter" and the tag number "1", "2", "3", etc.

    We will put some sample transcriptions on the web site so that you can see
    what they look like. One is already included as an Appendix to the Guide.

    David Seaman is working on an XML style sheet (see attached message).

    Please address any questions to me at cbf@socrates.berkeley.edu or
    (preferably) at cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu.

    On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Merrilee Proffitt wrote:

    > Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 15:35:20 -0800
    > From: Merrilee Proffitt <mproffit@library.berkeley.edu>
    > To: Charles Faulhaber <cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu>,
           David M. Seaman <dms8f@etext.lib.virginia.edu>
    > Cc: goetz@csua.berkeley.edu
    > >
    > David and Charles,
    >
    > I have put the files up at:
    >
    > http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium/transcription.html
    >
    > >On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, David M. Seaman wrote:
    > >
    > >> Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 07:11:24 -0500 (EST)
    > >> From: David M. Seaman <dms8f@etext.lib.virginia.edu>
    > >> To: cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu, goetz@csua.berkeley.edu,
    > > mproffit@library.berkeley.edu
    > >> Subject: README FIRST!
    > >>
    > >> cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu, goetz@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU,
    > >> mproffit@library.berkeley.edu
    > >>
    > >>
    > >> Hello again -- as I go into a week of teaching
    > >> etexts and ebooks in Rare Book School I thought
    > >> I'd unburden myself of the following drafts for
    > >> your review -- I'll get back to them next weekend
    > >> so any comments by them much appreciated.
    > >>
    > >> Coming to you in a series of emails are the following:
    > >>
    > >> 1) ds2.dtd -- XML update of ds.dtd
    > >>
    > >> 2) XML versions, updated for the new guidelines, of the
    > >> files you sent me -- martha1.xml, martha2.xml,
    > >> martha3.xml, and ucb152.xml
    > >>
    > >> 3) ds2guide.htm -- the draft of the updated guidelines.
    > >> DON'T please worry about the messy code -- I dumped this
    > >> down to HTML so you could review it easily for its
    > >> content but not its layout and format.
    > >>
    > >> 4) ds2.clb -- the beginnings of a NoteTab "library" for the
    > >> ds2 tags. To download Notetab Light (free) go to
    > >> www.notetab.com. Once it is installed in
    > >> c:\Program Files\Notetab Light put the ds2.clb file
    > >> in c:\Program Files\Notetab Light\Libraries and you
    > >> will have a ds2 choice for the left-hand column of
    > >> tags (in addition to teh HTML and other "libraries"
    > >> that come with the program).
    > >>
    > >> The parser and XSLT choices in the library won't
    > >> work yet as you don't yet have the software they
    > >> reference.
    > >>
    > >> Best,
    > >>
    > >> David
    > >>
    > >> P.S. am also working on a simple xsl stylesheet so folks can review
    > >> ds2 xml documents in Internet Explorer 5.5, launching directly from
    > >> Notetab should they wish.
    > >>
    > >
    > >Charles Faulhaber The Bancroft Library UC Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
    > >(510) 642-3782 FAX (510) 642-7589 cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu
    > >
    > >
    > >
    > >
    >

    Charles Faulhaber The Bancroft Library UC Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
    (510) 642-3782 FAX (510) 642-7589 cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu



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