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5. Walt Whitman: “After the Argument” #

This example contains the TEI header of the digital edition of a manuscript draft of “After the Argument,” a poem by Walt Whitman. It was encoded and made available by the Walt Whitman Archive.

This TEI header contains a detailed description of the electronic text in <fileDesc>. Apart from the required subsections, the edition of the electronic text is identified briefly in <editionStmt>. The <notesStmt> element contains a general remark about the dating of the manuscript.

Besides the file description, the header contains a detailed account of the file’s history in <revisionDesc>.

Functioning as the header of a manuscript transcription, however, one would have expected at least an <encodingDesc>, documenting how the electronic version relates to the source text. When this text is seen in isolation, this header falls short in explaining the editorial choices (that are referred to, however, in the <revisionDesc>). Of course, this text probably features in the wider context of the Walt Whitman Archive, where uniform encoding practices were used for all texts. Still, without repeating boilerplate information in each text of the archive, it would have made sense to provide an <editorialDecl> section with at least pointers to the external documentation of these practices available at https://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/editorial.html and https://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines. Furthermore, as the transcription is fairly detailed in the recording of editorial phenomena (additions, deletions, substitutions), identification of the different document hands in <profileDesc> could have made sense.

(Of course, these are only minor remarks, relative to the quality of the surrounding documentation of the archive in which this text is embedded. Yet, even if such external documentation exists, it makes sense to provide pointers in the document.)

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/.