Presenting enriched manuscript sources using HTML

If you have transcribed or annotated a manuscript (maybe using Nyingarn) how can you present your enriched version of the text and the original manuscript images so that others can benefit? And how can you do this in a way that does not add too much to your ordinary work?

A typical way of doing this uses the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) XML encoding, as seen in the Digital Daisy Bates project (https://bates.org.au/), that put online thousands of pages of manuscripts written in 1904 representing wordlists in a number of Australian Indigenous languages. This project encoded the vocabularies in TEI XML and the pipeline from source files to online version was written by Conal Tuohy. Any edits to the site have to be compiled by a command-line routine that rebuilds the site. I am unable to fix the routine if errors occur and I depend on others for troubleshooting. As the TEI has been around for a long time, I assumed there would be established platforms for displaying TEI texts. I investigated several existing TEI platforms for presenting the Bates images and text, but they could not display two page images with text as is required in this project. I was also disconcerted to find these platforms (not named for obvious reasons) were unreliable, and often had a single developer who was not always available to support them. When tested, their sites were often down, leading to my preference to create this site with simpler technology that has fewer dependencies.

I combined these versions of the manuscript to make a single diplomatic edition that allows a reader to follow the content in a way that was not possible with the original documents. Where the notes include genealogies (as seen above), I entered them into genealogical software to produce family trees, included on the site as images, with the text of the names included on the page to allow searching.

In order to allow readers to see the original pages and to make their own judgements about any text that I found difficult to read, links to relevant images were included for each page in the online version (https://rebrand.ly/LayardEfate). The main technical requirements are access to a server and a domain (both of which would also be needed if had used the TEI), sftp access, and knowledge of editing HTML.

The HTML version (https://rebrand.ly/LayardEfate) presents the text and images of the manuscript originals, sometimes up to eleven different page images corresponding to the same text accessed via small icons at the head of each page (see Figure 1). It is housed on a site controlled by me, not my university, and is copied by the Internet Archive, as it is a simple HTML page. The Bates pages are not properly presented in the Internet Archive as they are dynamically generated. The Layard page requires no maintenance and has no dependencies, and I was able to build the site myself. The code to add links to the images (shown in Figure 1) is shown in Figure 2. Where Layard included images in his notes I have added them as inline images on the page, as seen in Figure 3.

<a href=”images/mss84_b051_f001004.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”pageimage.jpg” alt=”” =”20″></a>
<a href=”images/mss84_b051_f001035.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”pageimage.jpg” alt=”” width=”20″></a>
<a href=”images/mss84_b051_f001051.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”pageimage.jpg” alt=”” width=”20″></a>
</div>
<div style=”text-align:center;”><p><b>Notes on the village of PANGO in the island of Efate in the New Hebrides
</b></p></div>

Figure 2 Sample HTML code used to link page images

While HTML lacks the ability to encode the rich structural detail that the TEI does, if the aim is to make the content of the manuscript readable and searchable online then HTML works well, especially for a small document like this one. Validation of HTML is not as exacting as of TEI XML, but can still be carried out, for example using https://validator.w3.org/.

Significantly, making this document legible has been crucial in solving a mystery posed by recent archaeological work that revealed the presence of at least 70 circular forms in the Efate landscape, varying in size up to 80 metres across. No one we talked to today had any recollection of what these circular forms were, but the Layard edition includes a description of a circular dancing ground and an image as can be seen in Figure 4. Since these documents were previously largely inaccessible, this edition has now allowed the mystery to be solved.

Figure 4. Drawing of the Naburia and Ekumali circular forms (Click to see the site)

The original microfilm of these notes was available in Vanuatu, but, with no functioning microfilm reader there, was not accessible. Even if the microfilm were legible there, the number of versions of the content was confusing to any potential reader. The present document has been rendered as a pdf for local viewing and a printed version is lodged with the Vanuatu National Library.

In conclusion, while the TEI is the technology of choice for work on complex documents such as illuminated mansucripts that are richly annotated, it is not necessarily the best approach for simpler editions like the one described here.

References

These papers are held at the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego, who kindly gave me digital copies of microfilmed versions of the documents. They are part of the John Willoughby Layard Papers, 1897 – 1974 (MSS 84): Notes re: villages of Pango, Oba, Vila and Eretap, [reel 38, frame 0101] Box 51 Folder 1-3. also https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0084.html

Thieberger, Nick (ed.), 2021. John Willoughby Layard Notes re villages of Pango, Vila and Eretap. Online resource: https://rebrand.ly/LayardEfate.

I’m grateful to the Tuzin Archive and to John Layard’s son, Richard Layard, for permission to produce this manuscript.