ebeshero
commented
7 years ago Updated header: to be adjusted slightly for each of the three texts. Because these separate preliminary XML files may serve as editions in their own right, the header is part of each file. However, it should be ignored for the purposes of collation.
<header>
<title level="m">FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS</title>
<edition>The Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition</edition>
<div type="editIntro">
<head>INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON THE TEXT</head>
<p>This is a digital edition prepared for the Frankenstein Bicentennial project, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the first published edition of <hi rend="italic">Frankenstein; or, the
Modern Prometheus</hi> in
1818.</p>
<p><title level="m">Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: Pittsburgh Bicentennial
Edition</title> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
4.0 International License.</p>
<p>Date this text was produced: 2017-05-20</p>
<p>This edition of the<!--ebb: IDENTIFY WHICH: [1818 | 1823 | 1831] --> text is part of the Pittsburgh research team’s contribution to the Bicentennial
Frankenstein Project, and is prepared by Elisa Beshero-Bondar of the University of
Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Rikk Mulligan of Carnegie Mellon University. We are grateful
for consultation from Wendell Piez, David J. Birnbaum, and Raffaele Viglianti, as well as
Neil Fraistat and Dave Rettenmaier. This edition’s stages of development are stored and
documented in the <ref target="https://github.com/ebeshero/Pittsburgh_Frankenstein/"
>Pittsburgh_Frankenstein GitHub repository</ref>.</p>
<resp>We have produced this XML edition for two purposes:</resp>
<list type="numbered">
<item>To prepare for automated collation of the 1818, 1823, and 1831 editions of <hi
rend="italic">Frankenstein</hi> using CollateX, in order to generate a TEI XML document
that stores the variations of these texts.</item>
<item>To provide a reliable digital base text of each edition tractable for collation, as a
stage in preparing a TEI P5 edition, and as a basis for related projects.</item>
</list>
<!--ebb: REMOVE THE NEXT PARAGRAPH FOR THE 1823 TEXT-->
<p>This edition is one of two that share the same electronic source, representing the 1818 and
1831 editions of the novel. This pair of editions is based on the Pennsylvania Electronic
Edition of <hi rend="italic">Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus</hi> by Mary Shelley,
edited by Stuart Curran and assisted by Jack Lynch, located at <ref
target="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/">http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/</ref> and
hereafter referred to as PA EE. Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Rikk Mulligan have corrected these
texts against photo facsimiles of the 1818 and 1831 publications.</p>
<!--<p>Our plain text edition preserves the rendering of italics, square brackets, and centered
text from the PA EE HTML texts.</p>
-->
<p>We have added page breaks using the TEI self-closing pb element. We will not be preserving
the running headers but will retain page number in order to link to page images in future
iterations of the text.</p>
<!--<p>To track pages from our source images we will be using the TEI self-closing milestone
element with "unNum" as the marker.</p>-->
<list>
<!-- <item>In the PA EE there is no distinction between italics for titles and italics for
emphasized words. Italics have been converted to hi elements with @rend="italic"</item>-->
<item>We preserved italics and small caps.</item>
<item>We have not normalized the spelling, and where the PA EE did so, we have silently
restored the spelling to its original state as observed in the photo facsimile
nineteenth-century editions. To prevent errors in collation, we have commented out editor
notes written by us recording our observations of errors in the source text. We have also
commented out the one instance in the 1831 PA EE HTML in which square brackets were used
to hold a normalized variant of a word, to suppress that from the output.</item>
<!--<item>When centered text is the heading of a chapter or book, we render it inside head
elements. Otherwise we use hi @rend="center".</item>-->
</list>
<!--<note resp="#ebb">Note for later processing: In the PA EE of this text, there are 1337 encoded links, each pointing to an editorial annotation.</note> -->
</div>
</header>
Now that we've completed proof-checking of all three base texts (1818, 1823, and 1831), I'm opening this issue to rough out the steps to prepare the documents for collation. In preparing a test collation working with Ch. 1 of 1818 and 1823 with Chs. 1-2 in 1831 on 3 May 2017, @djbpitt and I determined that it's easier to process the documents with collateX if they have been "XML-ified", that is converted from text format to XML. This is largely because our system of pseudo-markup to was becoming challenging to parse with regular expressions: we need to screen from the collation certain patterns from the collation (page-breaks, XML comments we've added among others), and we also want to preserve certain tags in the output XML from the collation. It turned out on experimentation that it's simply easiest to write legible Python code to process this if we're applying XML parsing rather than reading increasingly complex regular expression patterns.
Basically, we're converting our text files to a simple form of XML that will serve the purposes of collation. The elements in use are:
Attributes: