Objectives

In constructing a digital archive of selected materials from the Eartha M.M. White Collection, this project pursues several editorial objectives. We seek to document the archival items by presenting diplomatic transcriptions that record the items as-is, preserving to the best of our ability the spelling, punctuation, word spacing, use of capital/lower-case letters, abbreviations, line breaks, and other formal aspects of the originals. We endeavor to increase the accessability and usability of those texts by also presenting partially regularized reading versions of the texts. We aim to make possible new ways to analyze and visualize the documents through the encoding of the semantic features we deem to hold relevence for our understanding of the individual documents and the collection as a whole. Additionally, we seek to create a forum in which to theorize on approaches to collaborative digital editing, as well as to develop processes and standards that are both compliant with the current TEI P5 Guidelines5 and that can speak to the specific needs of our project and potentially others that may be similar.