Getting started with encoding

Helpful Links

The Encoding Process

Document Analysis should be the first thing you do
Encoding Steps
- Update your working directory in Subversion:
  - launch Oxygen
  - in the Tools menu, choose “SVN Client”
  - Control-click on the WWPtextbase/ directory and choose “Update” from the menu that pops up
  - It should either say “no incoming changes” or “Operation successful”.
- Find your tadpole
  - navigate to your ~/Documents/WWPtextbase/ folder
  - n the under_construction/ directory, locate your tadpole
  - open it in Oxygen (if your system is set up to open XML files in oXygen, you can just double-click the file)
- Encode the basic document structure:
  - if your text doesn’t have any front or back matter, delete <front> and <back>
  - enter the
    s and other major structural elements inside the <front>, <body>, and <back> elements as appropriate
- Start transcribing
  - omit the title page and table of contents for now
  - enter paragraphs and container elements like <quote> or <lg> before typing in their contents
  - fix any validation errors as soon as you see them
  - save often
- Commit your changes
  - at the end of your session, go back into the SVN client
  - navigate to your tadpole file
  - control-click on it and choose “Refresh” (⌘-R); you should see a little star appear next to your file
  - control-click on your file again and choose “Commit” (⌘-M); enter a message that has at least your personal key if not a useful message, and then approve the dialog box.

Encoding Tips

Thinking about Encoding
- Know that encoding can get very detailed: you’re marking up not just the basic organization of your text, but also a lot of other phenomena; you can expect that there will be some things you didn’t know you needed to encode that you will have to add in once you learn about them
- Think about what you’re doing as building a set of layers, rather than writing a stream; XML is really a set of enclosures, not a linear flow of details—and know that getting your brain wrapped around this way of thinking can be challenging!
- Don’t be afraid to say “I have no idea what I’m doing”
- Map out the book you’re working on before you get started; revisit document analysis as needed
- Keep an eye out for the tendency to miss spaces around elements
- Pay attention to the ways that punctuation should be used around elements; know that it might feel weird/different from non-encoded texts you’re used to working with
- Try to get some genre variety as you’re starting to encode; don’t be stuck in prose forever
Best Practices
- Do a review/read through of the documentation once you feel like you have your feet under you; it helps if, rather than thinking of the internal documentation as a thing you go to when you have a problem, you treat it as something you can learn from and read through just to see what’s there and build on your knowledge
- Look at other people’s texts as well, think about why people made the decisions that they made
- Continually validate (⌘-shift-V); it is OK to check in an invalid file, but problematic to check in an ill-formed file, thus check well-formedness (⌘-shift-W) before you commit [That said, if you really have to leave before you can fix an ill-formedness error, go ahead and check it in—we try to avoid checking-in ill-formed files, but leaving a file not checked in at all is usually worse.]
- Don’t forget to fill out your change logs for major milestones in encoding or proofing
- Left margin tidiness makes things much easier to read; the convention is that documents go in/right as you get further into the hierarchy
Process Suggestions
- Skip the title pages if it’s your first text. You can do those later, when you’re more comfortable with encoding.
- It’s helpful to paste in a bunch of <lb>s at once and then arrow down for each new line
- In the same way, you can fill in groups of <l>s with poetry
- Make yourself a template for page breaks and then copy-paste that in as you need it; it’s often easiest to set yourself up with a bunch of page breaks at once, rather than interrupting your encoding. Your template might look something like this:

<mw type="sig"></mw>
<mw type="catch"></mw>
<pb/>
 <milestone unit="sig" n=""/>
 <mw type="pageNum"></mw>

What to do if you don't know what to do

Look for error messages. For tips on how to read error messages, see: this guide
Check the internal documentation
Search in files to find example documents that have similar situations (knowing that it’s best to look at recently-encoded files, since some practices have changed). Start with the list of texts that were added since the WWP came to Northeastern
Put your problem in a comment so you’re not stuck if you can’t figure out what to do. To surround with a comment, select the text you want and hit: ⌘-shift-, (command-shift-comma)
Bring your question to a meeting
Ask your mentor
Check the [ http://listserv.neu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?INDEX listserv] to see if your question has been discussed in the past (DSGTAG-L)
Know that you can email people with questions; you don’t have to wait to grab someone in person

Getting started with encoding

Contents

Helpful Links

The Encoding Process

Encoding Tips

What to do if you don't know what to do

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