Encoding Edgeworth: TEI Development for Correspondence and Entity Indices

The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP) aims to make an open-access digital archive containing the complete correspondence of the Anglo-Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and her circle. TEI is central to this project as it is used to encode the text of the letters, create indices of named persons, places, and works, and ensure interoperability of the project long term. Letters in both English and French are present in the corpus. To date, over 200 letters have been encoded and made available on our beta site - https://melp.dh.tamu.edu/. In the next three years, this inter-institutional collaborative project plans to encode an additional 500 letters and provide minimal metadata for all remaining digitized letters using elements with the teiHeader. This presentation will cover the workflows currently being used to achieve this work as well as challenges the team is currently working through. For current workflows, the majority of encoding is completed by graduate assistants who are aiming to advance their skills in the digital humanities. These students use a TEI template to guide their letter encoding while spreadsheet data entry is the foundation for the indices. Adding entities to the indices involves in depth authority research using VIAF, GeoNames, Wikidata, and the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). Separate TEI files for persons, places, and works are subsequently generated from the spreadsheets using GREL in OpenRefine. GitHub is key to managing the TEI contributions of all project contributors for version control purposes. As many in the humanities have not used GitHub previously, training is essential. Possible solutions for future work will also be featured. As the team continues to add entities to our indices, opportunities to further capitalize upon the content negotiable authorities we have added needs to be explored. At present on our beta site the links are simply displayed when an established entity is present in a letter. In order to ensure the validity of our TEI, a goal is to set up automated testing in GitHub. Special considerations when encoding the French correspondence also need to be established and incorporated into existing documentation. Solutions for the idiosyncrasies we uncover within the letters while encoding, such as letters within letters, notes added by librarians, and the inclusion of unique diagrams or figures, also need to be continually developed.