Tips and best practices

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Using the Cultures of Reception Interface: Tips and Best Practices

Research strategies for locating reviews

  • Check DPLA
  • Check WorldCat
  • Check Google Books
  • As a last resort, try requesting an item using Illiad interlibrary loan
  • It's often helpful to limit your searches by dates, especially with very common periodical titles


Encoding strategies

  • You should use the long-s character (U+017F) but you don't need to worry about most other typographic details
  • If you have a reception item that is unclear enough that you can't be confident in encoding it, bring it to a meeting
  • Where possible, it's better to use the buttons to make sure that you're encoding consistently, although you can also type in the start and end tags if you don't have a button. Be aware that you won't get a warning if you're missing an end tag
  • You can use elements that aren't supplied by the interface, but you should do so according to the project's principles; use elements that help with tracking the things we are interested in without adding in elements just because you can
  • Check the WWP's internal documentation for more details on these elements
  • The interface will give you buttons for the following elements:
    • <head>: use for headings
    • <p>: paragraph
    • <lg>: line group—use to wrap around poems or selections from poems
    • <l>: line—use for each individual line of poetry
    • <italic>: use for italicized text; can be used in combination with other phrase-level elements as appropriate
    • <persName>: names of persons—note that some publishers are also persons, and should be encoded in <persName>
    • <placeName>: names of places
    • <quote>: use for quoted materials—this element will also display with quotation marks; if you have quotation marks in your text that are not part of a quote, you should type them in
    • <title>: use for titles of texts; note that these are often abridged in the reception items—titles need not be exact to be encoded in <title>
  • You can also use:
    • <note>: use for textual notes supplied by reviewers
    • <anchor>: use to mark the place in the reception item that a specific <note> is referring to
    • <rs>: use with @type of "properAdjective" for proper adjectives
  • You should not use
    • <name>
    • <said>
    • <emph>
    • <mcr>
    • <date>
    • elements for recording bibliographic information, such as <bibl> or <docImprint>
    • elements for page breaks or metawork

Using the interface

  • The interface will not default to saving your transcription, so be very aware of that it's possible (and very easy) to click out of a page and lose all your work. Hitting "update" to save will take you back to the original browse page; it won't actually tell you it saved the work, but the work is saved. You may want to back up longer transcriptions in a word-processing program, just to be safe.
  • The interface has a help page
  • If you flag a reception item, fill in a note in both the interface and the tracking spreadsheet explaining why it is flagged; use the flag function for serious issues with items or cases where further discussion is needed before the items can be published
  • If you have a single review or list of new books that includes multiple texts, only one of which is the reviewed text we're concerned with, make sure that the "Excerpt or Partial Transcription" button is checked and transcribe only the sections that are appropriate; if you have questions on what's appropriate, bring them to a meeting
  • The "Received Text" section provides information on the text that is being reviewed (the "original" text that is in WWO); the "Reception Item Details" section provides information on the thing that is being transcribed
  • You can add tags in the open tag field as needed
  • To use the search box or the "Show records" box, do not hit "Enter"—just click outside the search box and it should work.
  • The same principle applies to showing more than ten records; enter the number you want to display and then click outside the box. 100 is the maximum you can display.
  • You can't go back to browse after you've searched for a record or changed the number of items; instead refresh the entire page.
  • If you're trying to navigate to a specific reception item, change the number of records from 10 to 100, then do a keyword search for the author's last name, hitting "next" as needed to get to the page with the author you're looking for.
  • The colored boxes indicate the format of the reception item; you can mouse over them to see the format. Note that if you click the "poem" format, the box will show up as white (ie invisible), but it is still mouse-over-able.
  • Some discussion is needed on the differences between "format" and "genre" so fill these in as best you can and bring questions to a meeting if you have them.
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