One of the biggest and most urgent issues facing historical scholarship in the next several decades involves the transition to digital archival work, and with it the question of how the materiality of archival sources can be preserved, respected, and communicated in that translation. The importance of archival sources as material objects has become a vital branch of study in the last few decades, as historians and literary critics have begun asking detailed questions about the signification of paper, binding, type, etc., to the meaning of texts. This has occurred partially in response to the mania for textuality that was associated with the critical theory boom of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but it has also coincided with the advent of increasing digitization of the archives. On of the one hand, as anybody who has ever struggled with microfilm can tell you, digitized archives – even very simple ones that just display high quality digital images — can be a major step forward for scholars asking materially oriented questions. Most of the time on microfilm, binds are left unreproduced, paper and watermarks etc. are washed out in the harsh whites of the microfilm, and any sense of the materiality of the original document is lost in the always present awareness of the materiality of the film through which you are viewing it. Some digital archives, such as the EEBO database and a database I’ve been using a ton this semester, the Virginia Company Archives, are simply digitized images of microfilm, and thus perpetuate rather than alleviate the limitations of the microfilm era (which it’s worth noting made archives transportable in important ways – how else could we access significant manuscripts from the British Library at GSU?). Good digital imaging can really help with this – when you look, for example, at a high end database such as State Papers Online or the Cecil Papers, it is at least possible to see what types of paper are being used, and watermarks chainlines and other information occasionally bleed through. On really powerful imaging sights such as the Folger’s Luna database, even more can be accomplished.

But, it is inevitable that questions about the materiality of archival sources will ultimately need to be answered with physical rather than virtual sources. Even so, there are ways to make sure that as much of the physical information about a source as possible are being preserved in its digital form. This is something that TEI, a specialized set of XML tags, makes possible. At the Hoccleve Archives, I have been working on building TEI headers which contain significant bibliographic and material information about the manuscripts that we using to build our database.

By using TEI, I am able to record the provenance of the manuscript, make detailed notes about its binding, clasps, the parchment on which it was written, the numerous inks and pencil marks that have been added to it over time, etc.

This is the part of the post where I had intended to show you the TEI header that I have built. But, word press keeps converting it from code into a display copy that strips out most of the data that I wanted to display. Do any SIF’s out there know how to paste code into wordpress and have it display it as simple text?