Copyright held by
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Further details of licences are available from our
Licences page. For more
information, contact the project director,
Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
TY - ELEC
A1 - LeBere, Kate
ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Encode a Library Text
T2 - The Map of Early Modern London
ET - 7.0
PY - 2022
DA - 2022/05/05
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/encode_library_text.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/encode_library_text.xml
ER -
Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of
We’d also like to acknowledge students who contributed to MoEML’s intranet
predecessor at the University of Windsor between
These are all MoEML team members since 1999 to present. To see the current members and structure of our team, see
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
For thorough documentation on how to encode primary sources, see Encode a Primary Source Transcription. The following documentation explains how we encode semi-diplomatic transcriptions of primary source texts—in particular, the semi-diplomatic transcriptions housed in MoEML’s library. The purpose of these revised guidelines is to 1) standardize the encoding of our library texts, and to 2) limit and simplify the CSS required to adequately render these texts.
In our library texts we encode:
In our library texts we do
To lessen the amount of time spent on CSS, we have created a set of standard renditions for our library texts. Within
Semi-diplomatic transcriptions are transcriptions of texts that are not modernized or corrected for clarity. These transcriptions are not as strict as facsimile transcriptions which attempt to replicate the exact layout of the page. Rather, our goal is to normalize and regularize the features of the text that cannot be adequately captured through encoding (e.g., spacing, font-size, typographical ligatures) while retaining other significant features such as spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, and typographical errors. Our conventions for semi-diplomatic transcriptions can be found here. In summary, we:
If you run across a unique character while transcribing, you may be able to find it as a unicode character. For example, note the fleuron in this heading:
In this case, the encoder can use the unicode character U+2767:
A common non-standard character that appears in early modern texts is a thorn (þ) that looks like a small Latin letter y with a reversed hook above:
If you run across this character in your text, you will need to add a y͑
(regular y + U+0351) and tag it with the
While transcribing early modern texts, you will likely stumble across something that does not lend itself well to encoding. It is up to the
When you are transcribing a library text—especially if you are working from an EEBO TCP transcription—you will need to supply textual gaps. Our documentation on how to supply gaps can be found here.
If you are only encoding an excerpt from a primary source text, it is unlikely that you will need to encode front matter. If you are encoding a full text that includes a title page and other preliminaries (i.e., a dedicatory epistle, a letter to the reader, an introduction), you will want to nest this information in
After you have encoded the basic structure of your text, you will need to add page breaks. In our library texts, we:
Our documentation on how to link to facsimile pages on EEBO and EEBA can be found here. Once you have linked to the correct facsimile image, you will need to add an
In our Library texts we no longer encode printer’s ornaments or line rulings. If there is a woodcut image in the text, you can use
The first part of the text you will need to style is the page width. This styling goes on the
A quick way to add simple styling to your text is with
While we want to use CSS to describe how a text looks, we do not want to add CSS that takes a lot of guesswork and tweaking on behalf of the encoder. Our overriding concern when encoding primary source texts is to
Below is the
There are two different renditions for headings:
Sir William Wallworth Fishmon-versus
er, sometime Maior of Londondemonstrates the type of CSS styling that we do not want to do in our library texts. In this case, we would style the entire heading with
While dropcaps come in various sizes and styles, the
Indents appear throughout the library texts in both poetry and prose. The
The renditions
It should be noted that we differentiate between typeface
While superscripts are not very common in early modern texts, you may stumble across some that need to be styled. Many superscripts appear throughout
We tag all dates, names, organizations, and topynyms in our library texts. For a brief overview of how to tag these entities, see Tagging Dates, Companies, Toponyms, and People. While this quickstart is directed at those encoding