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Database-oriented annotation of early modern plays: a proposal

This essay proposes that the electronic texts of plays constituting a database-collection (in this case early modern drama) should be “annotated” by marking up not only its structural components but also the editorial annotations about a given feature or aspect of the play (usually included in the commentary notes of print editions), and that these annotations should be conceived having in mind the functionalities of a database. By marking up both the text's structural components and editor's information they constitute related data to be processed by the computer for searches and statistical analysis. This implies that texts should not be annotated individually and independently from the other anthologized works, but rather as part of an organized collection of data that, adequately encoded, will allow users to make queries into the whole database. A second section of the essay discusses three encoding mechanisms, based on the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, necessary to mark up these “annotations,” and possible ad hoc extensions of the TEI schema in order to represent the annotated features. Finally, a third section comments on practical examples showing how to encode a set of features: scene location, image, theme, allusion, proverb, wordplay, grammar, swearing expression, address form, as well as features covered by the TEI Guidelines such as roles, stage directions, names and place-names, verse form and textual issues.