mklamer/motherhood-journal

A Digital edition dissertation project

Motherhood-Journal

A Digital edition dissertation project

Project Website: www.elizabethgaskelljournal.com

The purpose of the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is to create an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript diary. This new edition provides a new transcription of the text, fully encoded in TEI-XML. Images of the journal's manuscript pages have been facilitated and implemented through IIIF frameworks. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal - Digital Edition offers contextual information including a scholarly Introduction, annotations, editorial notes, as well as a full prosopography identifying important individuals, texts, and geographic locations referenced in the journal. The project files are stored within this GitHub repository.

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition has been undertaken as a fulfilment of dissertation requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in the English Department at Michigan State University. This digital edition of the journal aims to make the text and facsimile images available to a broader audience, both scholars interested in Gaskell's life writing, and fans of her work who wish to delve more deeply into her writing beyond the novels.

The Gaskell Journal has been placed by Gaskell's descendants, the holders of its copyright, in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library in Leeds, UK. The journal is approximately 80 pages in length, written when novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's eldest surviving daughter, Marianne, was between the ages of six months (March 1835) and four years old (October 1838). I am grateful to Mrs. Sarah Prince, Gaskell's descendant and the copyright holder, for her gracious permission to reproduce the journal in this edition.

motherhood-journal's Issues

Coding the long "s" character

Has anyone ever encoded the long "S" character? Gaskell doesn't use it consistently, and I'd like to encode those instances where she chooses to use it in the manuscript. I'm not sure what sort of tag I would use for this, though, or whether it would be best to code the entire word where it appears or just the individual character?
I'm looking specifically at this instance of "blessing" on p. 12:

Perhaps there is some variation on the element where I could encode it so that readers could read it in standard text but still have it flagged as originally using the long s character?

Create ODD Schema

Need to start creating a schema for the journal

Surrounding unicode long s with "Choice" elements

Elisa,

I've just been updating my XML to surround the long s unicode characters (ſ) with <choice> element tags.

I debated whether to enclose the whole word or just the unicode characters and ended up just enclosing the character, so that each word using the long s (there were 119 in the document) looks like this "lessons", for example:
le<choice><sic>&#383;</sic><reg>s</reg></choice>sons

Is this correct? I thought this made the most sense. My thinking was, that when I render the text using XSLT I'll only want to change the individual character depending on the reading view (annotated would include the long s character whereas a simple reading view would replace it with the standard s character), and the rest of the word will remain the same.

Not fully knowing the procedures for writing the XSLT, though, I wasn't sure.

No hurry to reply - I just wanted to throw the question out there. I managed to use regex to also find the entire word, so if I need to do a find and replace to wrap the whole word in <choice> instead, I'm pretty sure I know how to do it.

Provide link to edition website from the Readme.md in this repo?

@MKlamer You might provide a link to your website from this GitHub repo to help connect the two, for any who (like us coders and edition developers) find our way to your project via GitHub! Try adding a link to the Readme.md file on your repo, and maybe on the description that appears at the top of the Code view.

Line break element

Is the line break or the element more useful for the project? I looked at other TEI diaries online and found that several used the line break element, so I started with that, but I'm not sure. The goal was to make the transcript line up with the manuscript. I'm hoping for a presentation similar to the Shelley-Godwin Archive, though obviously I will be much more limited with resources.

Element choices

I'm still working through which items I want to tag with elements in the text. So far, I've been basically copying what we do for Mitford. I've coded changes made to the text, places where the spelling differs from standard, proper names and titles - though I may have missed some of the latter.

Other possibilities:
I'm wondering whether to encode each instance of Gaskell and her daughters throughout the text, since it's a motherhood narrative, to make them easier to find. Is this unnecessary work?
Gaskell often falls into a pattern of addressing God at the end of the entries. I thought about encoding these with a "prayer" tag to mark those moments in which the voice of the text shifts, but I'm not sure which tag to use.

Oxygen no longer validating

I'm not sure why, but Oxygen no longer is checking my coding. It could be because:

I have a line that is too long (per an error message; I'm not sure how to find which one.)
I just upgraded to Oxygen 20.1 today.
I'm not sure how to make sure my schema is associated.

Schema no longer working

Project for next week: In my main transcript XML file, I don't seem to be able to use Xpath anymore.

I had used it (Successfully - my first practical use!) to find the last page number I'd used so that I could correctly paginate the part of the manuscript I was working on, and it found it at first. Then later, it wouldn't return anything, not even a list of basic paragraphs or divs in the document.

Now each time I run an xpath, it returns this:

It also says below my file that it can't find my schema. I think I may need to reconnect it... although it was such a barebones schema anyway I probably just need to back up and write a more tailored one if I can figure out how.

Create prosopography file to track and name xml:ids associated with the project.

File started. Need to update xml:ids for accuracy throughout main XML file, and then fill in the details for the prosopography.

Still determining how to create the

structure to separate out the entities by categories.

Line ends - minor detail for clarification.

I am trying to determine if there is a best practice scenario for encoding line ends. I'm currently using <lb/> elements, but I am getting confused about when and where to use them in certain cases.

For example: at the end of pages, I'm using both <lb/> and <pb/> elements (the latter with a @Number attribute). Is this redundant, or necessary - i.e. do I still need the <lb/> there?

Also, when a paragraph ends at the end of a line, is there a rationale behind whether the closing paragraph tag or the <lb/> comes first? Likewise, when the <lb/>, </p> and <pb/> all occur together, is there a best order?

Tasks for Monday 3/16 on Gaskell Journal Site

• @alnopa9 will work regex magic to help us see what's in the IIIF manifest JSON, and see if they're really page by page. We need to study the image files and see if there's a pattern for associating them with page images...

• @MKlamer will do JavaScript Ex 2 and learn about the classList toggle and see how to apply it for .sic and .reg

• @MKlamer will finish up the prosopography file, so we can pull its notes into the Gaskell Journal HTML for hiding/showing with JS. This will involve adding to the XSLT a variable that points to the proposopography XML. We'll use that variable to find where the @ref attributes in the Gaskell Journal file match up to @xml:ids in the journal file.

Coding partial text within a gap

For future reference:

The largest gap in Gaskell's diary is a missing third of a page. I've encoded this as a "gap" for now, but there are tiny bits of remaining text in the margin - the only legible part is one "=" sign, which Gaskell uses consistently to mark words that break across the line. This and the small strokes indicating the beginning of two other words make it pretty clear that there were probably six lines here originally, but I'm not sure how I code these marks in conjunction with the gap itself.

According to the TEI on the "gap" element (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-gap.html), it can contain a "desc" element. Would I encode the partial text within "desc", or do I need another element here?

Whitespace

Hi everyone... I've been continuing to code the manuscript and I realized that I have long lines of random whitespace throughout my document... sometimes it's appearing even within elements. I had tested pressing the "pretty print" button, so I'm assuming this is related to that. Is there a straightforward way to clean it up?

Example below: