The Menota handbook Guidelines for the electronic encoding of Medieval Nordic primary sources Version 2.0 TEI P5 conformant Odd Einar Haugen (editor) Tone Merete Bruvik, Matthew Driscoll, Odd Einar Haugen, Karl G. Johansson, Rune Kyrkjebø and Tarrin Wills (contributors) The Medieval Nordic Text Archive www.menota.org Bergen 16 May 2008 ISBN 978-82-8088-400-8 Preface page 1 Preface The first version of the Menota handbook, v. 1.0, was published on 20 May 2003, and a minor revision, v. 1.1., on 5 May 2004. Both versions are TEI P4 conformant. It was soon agreed among the editors that a new version should be published as soon as TEI P5 was finalised. This took place in November 2007, and the present v. 2.0 of the handbook is now TEI P5 conformant. While the previous versions were written in HTML, the present version is written in XML throughout, which we thought would suit a handbook on how to use XML. All things considered, v. 2.0 of the handbook represents a major revision. The preface to version 1.1 contains an overview of the background and the contributors to versions 1.0 and 1.1, which need not be repeated here. In the present version, Karl G. Johansson (Oslo) has written a new chapter on names, ch. 9.1, and Tarrin Wills (Sydney/ Aberdeen) has made a thorough revision of ch. 9.2 on metrical encoding, making it compatible with the international Skaldic project. He has also extensively revised ch. 7, which should be regarded as a completely new chapter. Furthermore, he has written a new introduction, ‘What is Menota’, aimed at readers who would like to get a brief overview of these guidelines. The remaining chapters and appendices have been revised by Tone Merete Bruvik and Odd Einar Haugen. Tone Merete Bruvik has checked and validated all examples, given advice on all kinds of encoding questions and developed new TEI P5 conformant schemas. Thus, Appendix D is her work entirely. Due to her long-standing contribution to the handbook she is now included as one of the six authors of the book, as will appear on the new title page. The remaining parts of the revision have been implemented by Odd Einar Haugen. The major changes from v. 1.1 are the following: 1. The handbook now offers two schemas for validation of XML files: a DTD schema (as in the previous version) and a RELAX NG schema (which is new). We recommend using a RELAX NG schema rather than a DTD, since RELAX NG allows for namespaces. 2. The concept of namespace, which was introduced in TEI P5, has been implemented in the handbook. As a consequence, all Menota-specific elements and attributes are clearly marked as ‘me’, e.g. <me:norm> rather than only <norm>. See the new chapter 1.9 for an explanation and a complete list of additional elements and attributes. 3. As stated above, Tarrin Wills has written a new introduction, ‘What is Menota’. 4. In ch. 1, the poem ‘Upon Julia's Clothes’ has been replaced with what some thought was a more suitable example, a stanza from the Eddic poem ‘Thrymskvida’, and the ensuing discussion has been made TEI P5 conformant. 5. In ch. 2.2.2 and ch. 5.1 we now advise readers to use Unicode encoding also outside Basic Latin, rather than entities. We insist that entities be used for characters in the Private Use Area. 6. Ch. 2.2.3 on the element <c> is new. 7. Ch. 2.3 has been revised with reference to deviation in word division and encoding of word constituents. 8. Ch. 2.4 on punctuation and white space is new. 9. In ch. 3, we introduce the new TEI P5 elements <ex> (rather than <expan>) and <am> (rather than <abbr>), see also ch. 6.1. The Menota handbook - Version 2.0 (16 May 2008) Preface page 2 10. The example in ch. 3.2 is new, and so is the image and the displays (using the Andron font by Andreas Stötzner, Leipzig). 11. In ch. 3.3 and 3.4 an important distinction has been drawn between ‘single-level transcriptions’ and ‘multi-level transcriptions’ (the Menota way, as it were). The new TEI element <choice> has been introduced as part of the multi-level transcription. This has also been done for <sic> and <corr> (see ch. 7). 12. Ch. 4.5 deals in more detail with prosimetrum texts, in which the elements <p> and <lg> are mixed. 13. Ch. 4.6 has a new solution to the problem of overlapping headings. 14. Ch. 4.8 on punctuation and hyphenation has been extensively revised. 15. Ch. 4.9 on initials and highlighted characters (littera notabilior) is new. 16. Ch. 4.10 on overlapping structures - which is a particularly thorny issue in XML - is completely new. 17. Ch. 5.1 is new, and part of ch. 5.2 has been moved from ch. 2 (which, as a consequence, has become simpler). Ch. 5 is now Unicode v. 5.0 compatible. 18. Ch. 6.1 is new, and the whole chapter Unicode v. 5.0 compatible. 19. As stated above, ch. 7 has been extensively revised by Tarrin Wills, and is for all intents and purposes a new chapter. 20. Ch. 8 has been extensively revised and introduces a new system for the general encoding of grammatical forms, using the @me:msa attribute. It also contains specifications for Old Norse and a discussion of lemmatisation of non-Nordic material. This should also be seen as a new chapter. 21. As stated above, ch. 9 has been extensively revised by Karl G. Johansson and Tarrin Wills. 22. Ch. 10 has been revised on a number of points, and now contains a discussion of the whole header (not only the manuscript description, as in v. 1.1). 23. The index is new. 24. The Menota schemas - DTD and RELAX NG - have been updated to TEI P5, and all examples in the handbook have been validated against a RELAX NG schema by Tone Merete Bruvik. 25. The discussion of headers in Appendix E has been revised and simplified. The downloadable headers in E.4 have been updated. Tor Gjerde (Trondheim) has given detailed and valuable comments on the previous version of the handbook, which proved very useful in the process of revising the book. Vemund Olstad (Bergen) has used his considerable expertise with the FO processor in order to generate the PDF files of the handbook from the underlying XML files. Many thanks to both. Bergen, 16 May 2008 Odd Einar Haugen (editor) The Menota handbook - Version 2.0 (16 May 2008) Introduction: What is Menota? page 1 Introduction: What is Menota? 1. Electronic editing of medieval texts The purpose of these guidelines is to define a framework for machine-readable editions of medieval Nordic texts. These guidelines are recommended for any scholar who wishes to produce detailed, machine-readable editions of primary works, that is, medieval Nordic manuscripts. 1.1. Menota and traditional editing practice Editions may include a very great amount of information in addition to the basic text of the manuscript: introductory material, including textual and literary contexts; the textual content, including diplomatic and/or normalised text; a variant apparatus or various manuscript versions; notes and other forms of critical apparatus; glossaries and/or indices of names. The present guidelines address all of these parts of an edition. The one exception is the textual or variant apparatus: as the approach of these guidelines is to encode different manuscript versions, the textual apparatus develops as each manuscript is encoded and aligned. The approach taken here, however, differs from traditional editions in the way in which the additional information is included and consequently the possibilities of presentation. Traditional print editions rely on a very large amount of referencing between the text and the apparatus: note references may refer the reader to the notes section; glossaries and indices refer the reader back to the main text; the textual apparatus refers usually to line and/or page numbers; and aligned texts usually rely on visual parallels, such as facing pages. The approach taken here allows all of this information to be encoded without complex referencing, allowing information about a section of text to be checked, or presented, at the same time, depending on the capabilities of the display medium. The complexity of referencing, however, is replaced with a certain amount of complexity in encoding. 1.2. Machine-readable editions The approach of Menota differs from the production of electronic texts using word- processing or desktop publishing software because the texts are machine-readable, that is, the texts are marked up in a way that meaningful entities within a text can be read and manipulated by a computer. The approach taken here can be used to distinguish between different types of information in the text and consequently can extract and present the information of most interest to particular users, for example, students, literary scholars, linguists, palaeographers. A student may wish to read the normalised text; a linguist might only be interested in the word distribution, and so on. Using this method, one can also produce editions for different media: printed and electronic books, interactive web applications, portable devices, CD-ROMs and so on. The Menota handbook - Version 2.0 (16 May 2008) Introduction: What is Menota? page 2 1.3. Menota and other encoding schemes Menota is based on the scheme defined by the Text Encoding Initiative. It defines further extensions based primarily on two major differences between Medieval Nordic texts and most other comporable corpora: 1.