The REED London project team has developed a set of encoding guidelines and principles that form our methodology when working through the many records in our collections. It is important to track the encoding work we do because it has evolved over many years, and the process is an iterative one, leading to ever more questions and opportunities to capture information through tagging.
REED London relies on the TEI Consortium Guidelines from which we have developed a custom schema to support our research-centric encoding.
REED London's editorial intent is complicated by the fact that we are remediating the editorial work undertaken by editors before us who consulted the archival documents in situ, then decided which excerpts applied to their editorial mandate, and then transcribed those excerpts so as to be replicable in printed form. We have now further interpreted that work so as to make it navigable in a screen environment. We regret any errors in transforming and formatting that information.
Our encoding is both structural and semantic, describing the transcribed texts as well as the information within them. Not all of the tagging is viewable in the LEAF-Writer reading mode (e.g., tags that indicate expansions, or in which margin a note was placed, are documented in the TEI code but not visible by default).
If you are interested in considering or adopting our structural encoding approach you can see our template here.
A word about terminology: we refer to a 'document' as being the source material from which the records are excerpted. Because the original editors distinguished these documents by year-range, we have continued that practice. For example, a document could be "Baker's Company Court Minutes 1560-1." However, a letter or diary entry would also be considered a document, such as "Letter of John Chamberlain to Mistress Alice Carleton, February 18, 1612/13." Within that document is a 'record-set' -- which refers to the gathering of all excerpted information within a document. Within a record-set are a series of 'records' -- the discrete excerpts that apply to a dated entry, focused financial transaction, or the like. Records refer to performance or performance business events.
Below you will find our decisions about how to tag and manage entities. This is a living document and so expect that these decisions will continue to evolve over time. We will endeavour to indicate when a new decision is added.
Diane K. Jakacki & Rachel Milio
July 2, 2024