Victorian Women Writers Project

The approximately 200 original, online texts that are currently part of the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) were produced by transcription and originally encoded in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, version P3, using the TEI Lite DTD (version 1.6).

In an effort to bring the encoding up to date, the original SGML, TEI P3 files were transformed to XML, TEI P4. Aspects of the encoding that were not conducive to automatic mapping and transformation were updated manually. In 2009, the TEI P4 version of the files were transformed yet again to the most current version of the TEI P5, which also required manual intervention to address aspects lost in translation, and also to conform to the newly revised Best Practices for TEI in Libraries. The VWWP texts now rely on a custom W3C schema.

Plans to support ongoing encoding of texts and the addition of contextual materials are in the works. The original SGML encoding guidelines are being revamped in support of richer, scholarly encoding. Once that phase of the project is stable, encoding guidelines and other relevant documentation will be posted.