Jerome McGann, Laura Mandell, and Dana Wheeles, This is a very late reply to a 7 May message on the NASSR list requesting communications regarding electronic resources and electronic editions. And let me both warn you about and apologize for the length of this email. It expanded beyond my original intentions as I wrote. --- I am currently preparing TEI versions of William Hone's *Every-Day Book*, a project I started in html some years ago. The first volume and a little more are currently available online , and I have transcriptions of about 2 thirds of the second (and last) volume. I am writing now, both to let you know the state of the project and to solicit any advice you might have for carrying it through to completion in a form that conforms to NINES specs. My work with TEI has been minimal thus far (and that has been self-taught), but I'm finding that, for this project I am running into some very basic mark-up issues that I really should sort out before I go much farther. I can't as yet describe my practice to you in any final way since it's still developing. Given the nature of Hone's books and the uses researchers might have for them, the issue I am dealing with at the moment has to do with what might be called "indexical" mark-up--that is, identifying and tagging references in the text that might be the focus of some scholarly search. (Few people are likely to read through Hone's volumes for their own intrinsic interest as they might do with literary works; instead, the more likely use will be as a reference for scholars investigating other topics.) Most prominent among the "indexical" keys are names of people, names of places, titles of publications, and dates. With people and places, my practice (I'm working with TEI-lite, P4) has been to use Referring String tags with type, reg, and key attributes. Thus if Hone is talking about himself, the mark-up might look something like this: the editor And a place might look like this: Byron's playhouse Dates use the appropriate Date tag with a value attribute like this: twenty-sixth of June And titles use the Title tag, thus: Hamlet A few notes and questions about this mark-up practice... *** I understand that TEI P5 (and perhaps the NINES specs as well) may not use the same Referring String tags and "reg" attributes. True? If so, what would you recommend as an approach to tagging proper names so as to make them accessible to searches and to XSL stylesheets? And should I convert to P5? *** I've been working with a small database to keep track of people mentioned in Hone's book, and the "key" attribute contains the primary key for the specific entry in this database. Do other projects take a similar approach? If so, we could devise a common protocol for deriving the primary key, and this would make possible a collective database of all documents using the same mark-up approach. Or would it be more sensible just to use the person's full name as represented in the "reg" attribute as the primary key for a database? *** I currently have all places--331 Strand, Hawkshead, Devonshire, Scotland, Orient...wherever--lumped together with a single attribute: "place." Do other projects mark places? If so, should my practice be adjusted to accommodate them? Should I be distinguishing counties and countries and cities and such? *** Dates seem pretty clearly and sensibly established in the TEI guidelines. Do other projects take a markedly different approach from my own? The key here, of course, is to include the "value" attribute with dates in the yyyy-mm-dd format so that an XSL command can process them regardless of how they are represented in the actual text. *** I have mixed feelings about the Title tags. On the one hand, the tag seems tailor made for...well...titles, and it's easy enough to write XSL that will select and order and format these as titles. On the other, people might look up titles as in a reference book index, and this suggests that an RS tag might be more appropriate. Maybe something like 'Shakespeare's bleak tragedy' rather than the simpler 'Shakespeare's bleak tragedy'. What would you recommend? Such are the sorts of questions I am working through at the moment. I realize that these are not the solutions to structural problems that the original email requested, and I realize too that, as a TEI and XML auto-didact, I may be wildly off-base in my thinking. Nonetheless, if there is anything here you find useful, please use it. And if you have any suggestions that will make my project more NINES-conformant, I would be most grateful to hear them. Many thanks, Kyle Grimes Jerome McGann, Director, NINES (jjm2f@virginia.edu ) Laura Mandell, Associate Director, NINES (mandellc@muohio.edu ) Dana Wheeles, Project Manager, NINES (dw6h@virginia.edu )