The Practice and Benefit of Applying Digital Markup in Preserving Texts and Creating Digital Editions: A Poetical Analysis of a Blank-Verse Translation of Virgil\u27s Aeneid
Numerous examples of the digital scholarly edition exist online, and the genre is thriving in terms of interdisciplinary interest as well as support granted by funding agencies. Some editions are dedicated to the collection and representation of the life\u27s work of a single author, others to mass digitization and preservation of centuries\u27 worth of texts. Very few of these examples, however, approach the task of in-text interpretation through visualization. This project describes an approach to digital representation and investigates its potential benefit to scholars of various disciplines. It presents both a digital edition as well as a framework of justification surrounding said edition. In addition to composing this document as an XML file, I have digitized a 1794 English translation of Virgil\u27s Aeneid and used a customized digital markup schema based on the guidelines set forth by the Text Encoding Initiative to indicate a set of poetic figures—such as simile and alliteration—within that text for analysis. While neither a translation project nor strictly a poetical analysis, this project and its unique approach to interpretive representation could prove of interest to scholars in several disciplines, including classics, digital scholarship, information management, and literary theory. The practice serves both as a case-in-point as well as an example method to replicate with future texts and projects
