About Poetess

A Statement of Electronic Editorial Principles

TEI-encoded files adhere to the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) Consortium rules and guidelines for the XML encoding of texts. As stated on the TEI Consortium website:

Initially launched in 1987, the TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.

The Text Encoding Initiative has developed an application of XML devoted to the presentation of archival materials and rare books. In other words, TEI is the code one should use if making library-quality editions. You can view that code in a simple text program such as BBLite or NotePad. You can sometimes view TEI/XML files in a browser, but not always: some browsers don't properly read TEI Documents (Netscape, for instance, will not reveal any of the TEI codes; Firefox removes them). We are using at this site TEIP4, but of course any usage of this code is an interpretation, and so we explain the rules we followed here (below).

You will find in the TEI version of each document housed at this site the following editorial declaration:

<encodingDesc>
 <editorialDecl>
  <p>This document follows the rules specified for TEI use by NINES. </p>
   <p>All quotation marks and apostrophes have been transcribed as entity references.</p>
   <p>Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.</p>
   <p>Because of web browser variability, all colons and hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard; dashes have been rendered as two hyphens.</p>
   <p>Special characters (letters with accents, etc.) have been coded according to Unicode rather than as entity references.</p>
   <p>Page numbers appear at the beginning of each page, no matter where originally placed.</p>
 </editorialDecl>
</encodingDesc>

The URLs for any images or pictures associated with a TEI-encoded document and any URLs used in any of these TEI documents (in their notes, for instance) are listed in Entity Files:

figuresBarbauld.ent / urlsbarbauld.ent -- for works appearing in Barbauld's Prose Works

figuresBijou.ent / urlsbijou.ent -- for works appearing in The Bijou

figures.ent / urls.ent -- for works appearing in the Poetess Archive proper.

To get this centralized system for maintaining URLs to work, we had to modify our Prologue:

<!-- The following entities, attributes, and notations have been added by Laura Mandell on 11 February 2005 -->
<!-- The files 'figuresBijou.ent' and "urlsbijou.ent" contain entity declarations -->
<!-- for all external entities needed by this document -->
<!NOTATION jpeg PUBLIC
'ISO DIS 10918//NOTATION JPEG Graphics Format//EN' >
<!NOTATION gif PUBLIC
'-//TEI//NOTATION
Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format//EN' >
<!NOTATION tiff PUBLIC
'-//TEI//NOTATION Aldus Tagged Image File Format//EN'>
<!NOTATION png PUBLIC
'-//TEI//NOTATION IETF RFC2083 Portable Network Graphics//EN'>
<!NOTATION html SYSTEM "text/html">
<!NOTATION pdf PUBLIC
'-//TEI//NOTATION Adobe Photoshop Graphics Format//EN'>
<!NOTATION html SYSTEM "text/html">
<!NOTATION text SYSTEM "text/html">
<!ENTITY % myFigures SYSTEM "http://www.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess/works/figures.ent"> %myFigures;
<!ENTITY % myURLs SYSTEM "http://www.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess/works/urls.ent"> %myURLs;

Our editorial decisions are explained in greater detail in the instructions for using TEI developed by Laura Mandell for the NASSR 2004 Editing Seminar (8 September 2004, Boulder, CO).
For more examples on using TEI please see the TEI by Example Website.