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3. Christopher Marlowe: The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text) #

This example contains the TEI header of the digital edition of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text), encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library.

This TEI header provides decent descriptions of the publication details of the electronic text (<publicationStmt>), and the languages occurring in the text (<langUsage>). A reference system is declared in the <encodingDesc> section of the header, using <refState> elements (see section 2.3.5.3 Milestone Method of the TEI Guidelines).

The revision description is interesting both in a positive and a negative way. It clearly contains a detailed list of the changes. The list seems to be generated by an automated versioning system, which allows one to keep complete track of a file’s historical states, and document changes with log messages. Integrating automated revision control in the <revisionDesc> section of the TEI header is an interesting idea, as it combines processability and expressiveness. However, on the encoding level, this integration could be improved. In this case, a single <change> element is (ab)used to record the complete revision history. If the output of the automated version control system would be formatted to distinct <change> elements per revision (either directly, or via a post-processing step), this would make the information much more compliant with the semantics of the TEI header.

One essential point of critique concerns the lacking description of the source document in <sourceDesc>. In this case, the title and author of the source work (that can be recollected from the information in the <titleStmt> subsection) still provide cues to its origin, but this could be much harder for less known texts. It is reasonable to suppose that the source texts of the files in the Perseus Digital Library are documented externally, but then the TEI header sections of these files should at least contain a pointer to these resources.

Bibliography

• Erasmus, Desiderius. 1867-1872. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami colloquia familiaria. Lipsiae: sumptibus Ottonis Holtze. Encoded and made available by the Stoa Consortium, University of Kentucky at https://web.archive.org/web/20160220004338/https://www.stoa.org/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Stoa:text:2003.02.0006.
• Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. 1885. “Letter of November 7, 1885.” Encoded and made available by the Lincoln Electronic Text Center of the University of Nebraska at https://higginson.unl.edu/letters/LC1885k07.html.
• Islam, Mubina. 2004. “A Selection of Sonnets: electronic edition encoded in XML with a TEI DTD.” Unpublished Master’s Dissertation, London: University College London.
• Marlowe, Christopher. 1616. The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus. Encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library. Available online at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0011.
• Shakespeare, William. 1978. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by Alexander, Peter. London: Collins.
• Whitman, Walt. 1890. “After the Argument.” Manuscript encoded and made available by the Walt Whitman Archive at https://www.whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/transcriptions/loc.00001.html.
• Wilde, Oscar. 1930. “The Importance of Being Earnest.” In: Plays, Prose Writings and Poems. London: Everyman. Encoded and made available by CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork. Available online at https://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E850003-002/.