Making Progress

Today was another productive work day. I am going through the reference note cards at a pretty good pace. I am finding that deciphering the content on these cards is much like detective work. I have to determine what is written on each card (and the handwriting is not always easy to make out), I also have to decode the different abbreviations that are used to represent places, people, publishing companies and more! I am very lucky to have Dr. Murphy and Dr. Lennon helping me determine the correct information. Today Dr. Murphy showed me the program that we are going to use to put this text online. The program is called Oxygen and basically what it does is sets up an XML format for your text. We are often familiar with HTML formats; XML is very similar but just a different way to encode text. In a way it is like the back side of the virtual paper that we see online. The codes that are entered in XML tell the computer what each word is (i.e. name, date, place, language etc). As we continue to go through the note cards I will also begin working on the XML and encoding the text. I'm very excited to begin this work because it is a brand new skill that I will be learning. If any of you are interested in looking at XML information or text encoding to see exactly what I'll be working on visit this website: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SG.html

Until Next Time...