PREFACE TO RENAISSANCE ELECTRONIC TEXTS

The Renaissance Electronic Texts series consists of old-spelling, electronic editions of single manuscript or printed copies of early English works, encoded in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) syntax. Normally, two tagsets are employed: the RET one, and HTML. Often these two appear in the same document. Initially, RET volumes include only introduction, text, and appendices. Full annotation is postponed.

Both paper and electronic editions may be read, but only the second can be transformed into other forms easily, such as concordances, collations, and specialized kinds of edition. RET editions enable researchers to experiment with the texts and to use the software of their choice. If accompanied by digitized images of the source, however, electronic editions also take on an archival role, preserving something of the original and providing readers a way of checking transcriptions. An image base can assist in understanding books, language, and literature, and help to increase knowledge by an computer-based analysis of the texts. The electronic edition is a sound basis for future work on primary texts. Drawing on palaeography and bibliography, it supplies historical scholars with a flexible medium for studying them.

The first volume in the Renaissance Electronic Texts series is Certaine Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, In the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory, published in 1623. The second volume in the Renaissance Electronic Texts series is Edmond Coote's The English Schoolmaister (1596). Shake-speares Sonnets, published in 1609, is the third.

The principles of RET editions are as follows:

• The entire text of a book is always transcribed, including titlepage, headings, running titles, catchwords, and signatures.

• Each electronic transcription follows only one physical copy of a book or manuscript and need not include variant readings from other editions or emendations. Typos, that is, apparent errors, can be left as is, with the error noted, or they can be corrected within a tag.

• All texts in this series employ one character-encoding scheme and draw from a common set of reference tags. Without this kind of uniformity, the texts could not be analyzed together.

• Different characters in the text normally have their own unique representation in the electronic transcription. If any two or more characters are conflated into one character (e.g., different forms of r), this practice is stated at the beginning of each electronic text. Otherwise, editions retain the spelling, capitalization, brevigraphs, special characters, and font of the original. No attempt has been made, however, to identify damaged types or to distinguish between the two dominant forms of Renaissance pica, S­face and Y­face. Only an examination of the physical depression made by each piece of metal typeface into the paper can determine that adequately. Changes in the paper over time, and the ill-defined nature of the ink blot, are not satisfactory for this degree of discrimination.

• Any character or group of characters that does not appear in lower ASCII is identified by an ISO entity reference or is given a separate coded representation within braces. Because different printers and scribes render the same character differently, character representations in RET concern generic entities. For example, the ampersand takes many forms, secretary and italic and roman, but it is coded as |&| in all texts (a form that appears mainly in italic hands of the period).

• Spacing between words is highly irregular in Renaissance texts. In general, unless otherwise specified, word-separator spaces are rendered as single, no matter how small or large the physical gap between the words. The layout of each book is kept, including word-separation, lineation, indentation, paragraphing, and pagination, but this is managed mainly by tagging.

• Graphics--ornaments, woodcuts, engravings, lines, illustrations, leaf-designs, etc.--are noted within comment-brackets but not reproduced.

• All text is entered where it appears.

• The electronic transcription of an empty page includes essential page tags but has no blank spaces. All spaces at the start or the end of a line are ignored or indicated by tags where significant (e.g., indented lines in stanzas).

• Abbreviations are all tagged as such and are normally expanded, except where a very literal transcription is desired.

• Damaged, interlineated, and canceled text is all tagged.

• Encoding is governed by the need for economy, accuracy, and readability.

For further discussion, see the RET encoding guidelines.

December 1997