Pack: TEI materiality text alignment for Now art thou sociable

“now art thou sociable…now art thou what thou art”: Surfacing TEI Encoding in the Bodleian First Folio’s The Tragedy of Romeo and Iuliet

Pip Willcox and David De Roure

Abstract

The Bodleian First Folio project has created digital editions of the 906 pages of text from this first edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The editions are transcribed and encoded in TEI P5-conformant XML. The Bodleian First Folio’s Web interface gives the reader access to digital images of the First Folio alongside the formatted transcribed text. There is information in the TEI about the materiality of the book which is not visible to readers through this interface.

Making a Portable Document Format (PDF) version of the First Folio was a requirement of the project. Using one of the First Folio’s plays, The Tragedy of Romeo and Iuliet, this paper describes a proof-of-concept exercise, bringing together high resolution images of the First Folio with an accurately transcribed and encoded text into a PDF. In this format, text search terms appear highlighted in the image, the text can be copied and pasted, edited, and enhanced, and textual and material annotations can be viewed and added. The exercise demonstrates what is possible with existing tooling and points to future developments.

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