I’ve been thinking about what to do next with the Villani text. Considering we’ve been dealing in detail with the Esposizioni, the work we need to do between now and putting Villani online should be simple and quite similar to what we’ve done before, shouldn’t it? Well, yes and no: our two Villani editors-and-encoders are both at institutions other than Brown, not particularly close to each other. I’ll be getting a bit more involved in Villani as well, documenting the process as thoroughly as possible. All of this points to the blog as a good, systematic communication system that hopefully opens us up to critique and other helpful input from colleagues we don’t even know we have.

So, this is a first attempt at a to-do list for Villani. It’s tentative, but I’m pretty sure we have to do the first two bullet points before moving on to other things.

• Go through dtd and correct the typos: I’ve used the power of software to create a DTD (Document Type Definition, where the formal rules for encoding are stored). We won’t actually be using the DTD to prescribe encoding, but making it automatically has helpfully revealed some typos in the XML, which need to be corrected. More on this below.
• Debug attributes: A bunch of unconventional (to me) stuff was done with the encoding; some attributes have more than one value and we decided to use blank spaces to represent that (for example, <person role=”duke captain”>). But we must go through all the attributes again and delete any stray spaces: for example, it would be confusing to write <person role=”duke captain ruler of the people”> because “of” is not on the same semantic level as “duke”. I will leave that to Matt and Rala, and will help as needed.
• Run text by Paul: I’m pretty sure the blank space thing is going to be all right, but I’m not comfortable enough with how XML interacts with other languages we’re using in the back end (notably PHP). So I’ll show it to Paul and ask him whether our mark-up is unnecessarily clunky in a glaring way. Anything that needs fixing won’t need re-encoding from scratch; we’ll find a way to automate as much of the transformation as possible, if it comes to that.
• Put the text online: …and debug until it works. :)
• Blog encoding principles: Matt and Rala will post here a completist account of their encoding principles, perhaps with a chart or table of all elements and attributes accompanied by the reasoning behind them. This will be the beginning of a document that will be publically linked from the main VHL site, and that will serve as a starting point for introducing other scholars to our work.
• Move on!: Then the real fun begins: I will perhaps do a first pass at indexes (*cough* with a little help from my friends…) while the Villani scholars annotate?

Comments? Additions? Subtractions?