Document and Project Analysis Julia Flanders Brown University Women Writers Project
Julia_Flanders@Brown.edu

Copyleft 2007 Julia Flanders and Brown WWP

 Stanford Humanities Center

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Document and project analysis

Document and project analysis guide: decisions about the level of encoding: how much detail decisions about how to do the encoding decisions about modernisation, regularization, transcription

Importance of understanding the material you’re working with, before you begin: base a whole set of decisions about encoding on the nature of the documents and the nature of your project goals decisions about the level of encoding (how much detail) decisions about whether to do successive shallow encoding layers across a wide set of documents, or start with a few documents in detail decisions about modernization, regularization, and transcription

Basic questions about your project

duration audience funding level and funding source

A set of basic questions to ask before you begin:

About your project: long-term or short-term? Is this going to go on for years? If so, need to take into account things like staff turnover, the possibility that funding won’t be renewed audience: scholarly? General reader? K-12? General academic? This would affect decisions about whether to modernize spelling, the level of documentation of amendation, etc. funding level and funding source: grant? Institutional support? None/shoestring? This would affect decisions about how intensively to encode (can you afford really detailed encoding? Do you have time?) and what kind of staff you can hire (students? Full-time professional staff? Faculty or existing staff (e.g. librarians) from your university? This in turn will affect the kind of training you need to provide, the level of skill (encoding and content) you can expect, the kinds of quality checks you need to build in.

Basic questions about your documents

generically similar? temporally similar? any special challenges?

About your documents: are they generically all the same or very different, wide-ranging? Are you going to have to handle many different genres? Many different kinds of instances of a given genre (i.e. a complex implementation of a genre) do they have much in common? are they all from the same time period, by the same author? Or are they going to pose different kinds of issues (different kinds of spelling variation, different kinds of presentation, different kinds of textual structures)? do they pose any special challenges? E.g. non-Roman characters, characters not in Unicode? Complicated graphical layouts?