Related to my other proposal—a sort of general discussion of text encoding—I wonder if anyone would be interested in trying to put ideas about text encoding into practice by trying to imagine into existence a small mini-edition of some interesting but neglected text.¹ We would need to thing through the entire process: questions of textual scholarship (what state of a text to represent; what annotations or apparatus does it need to be useful to readers; in what formats should be encoded; what outputs can/should we provide; how/where could it be hosted).

We probably wouldn’t have enough time to complete such an endeavour, but we would have enough time to get started.

1. As a starting suggestion for a text that could benefit from such an edition, I don’t think Hope Mirrlees’s early twentieth-century poem Paris has a good digital representation on the web right now—though a rather raw looking PDF is available.)

I continue to be fascinated by the fundamental problem of representing texts—I’m thinking of literary texts in particular (and, lately, poetry, especially), and the many solutions (all variously imperfect) that people use. I have in mind all the various technologies that folks use to represent texts (whether remediating historical texts or authoring their own). This could include complicated, semantically rich models like that of the TEI, to that most ubiquitous of markup formats—HTML, or the lean, simplified “markup” of Markdown. We could also think about the related tools (from XSLT or Pandoc… or, my latest favorite and a real dark horse in this race, Pollen), which can make such texts usable in different ways.

I’d be happy to meet and talk with people of any level of experience (seriously! if TEI/HTML/Markdown are all equally befuddling terms, this could be a session to hash what they mean!) about the passion and perils of text encoding.