There has been a lot of activity over the Hoccleve Archives projects over the last few weeks, mostly relating to a series of computer files known as the HOCCLEX files. These files, which date from the 1980’s, were originally developed by a team of researchers, led by D.C. Greetham, working on a critical edition of Hoccleve’s magnus opus, the Regiment of Princes. They are careful transcriptions of three holograph manuscripts that contain about three dozen poems. Holograph manuscripts are those written by their author, and one of the things that makes Hoccleve so interesting is these three holograph manuscripts, because very few examples of works actually written by their authors survive from this period (most extant manuscripts were produced by scribes, but Hoccleve was a scribe, so he produced his own manuscripts). The HOCCLEX files took the holograph manuscripts and used an early and now mysterious, computer language to mark the transcripts for grammar and spelling. The original idea was that the HOCCLEX files would provide a lexicon of Hoccleve’s usage, so that editors of the Regiment, which survives in many manuscripts, but none by Hoccleve himself, could use the HOCCLEX files to make editorial decisions about spelling variants and similar discrepancies between manuscripts. Unfortunately Greetham’s proposed edition never materialized, though they were used by Charles Blyth in his 1999 edition of the Regiment.

Since that time, the HOCCLEX files, and the treasure-trove of information they contain about Hoccleve’s Middle English, have not been easily accessible to scholars. Not only were they privately stored, but more importantly, they were developed using a now-lost and unknown piece of software, making them difficult to use in their original format. My computing oriented SIF colleagues have built a custom-script that allows the HOCCLEX files to be translated into .TXT and XML formats. In this new format, the files will serves as the basis for several forthcoming substantive additions to the Hoccleve Archives website.
1. Once a database and HTML display are created, the HOCCLEX files will populate the Hoccleve Lexicon, a fully searchable and browsable guide to Hoccleve’s orthography and diction. In this form, they will serve as a robust and public version of what they originally designed to be, an invaluable source of primary material for users of the crowd-sourced editorial tools we will develop to create a digital critical variorum edition of the Regiment of Princes. Moreover, because the Lexicon will be public and searchable in ways beyond those possible when the HOCCLEX files were created, they will be open to researchers asking a broad variety of questions about Hoccleve’s texts and the development of the English language and its poetry.
2. With the addition of a more detailed XML mark-up and a style-sheet, the HOCCLEX files will allow us to host a digital edition of the poems in the Holograph manuscript.
3. The HOCCLEX files are now an important primary source in their own right, evidence of an early moment in the history of the digital humanities. By making them available, we will be documenting that history, an important step in our larger aim to use the Hoccleve Archive as a hub for preserving and sustaining the history and practice of scholarly editing in the digital humanities.