Database-oriented annotation of early modern plays: A proposal

Abstract

In this essay, I explore the idea of annotating the electronic text of early modern plays having in mind the functionalities of a database in which the plays would be collected, and how the texts could be encoded so that a search for a given annotation could retrieve the corresponding segments in the play-texts. Although I refer to English plays of the 16th and 17th centuries, I do not envisage any actual database project for a specific corpus of plays; rather I reflect generally and theoretically on the concept of database-oriented annotation, which involves both interpreting aspects of the play (such as the use of proverbs, allusions, oaths, images, etc.) and associating these interpretations to the electronic text by encoding them in Extensible Markup Language (XML) conformant with the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). To this reflection, I devote a first section of this essay. Although I imagine users querying a database online, I am not concerned with defining a database management system, any specific database-driven web application or any user interface, but limit the technical description to discussing three TEI-conformant markup mechanisms, including possible ad hoc extensions of the TEI encoding scheme, for tagging texts that would be either transferred into, or already hosted in, a database. This discussion is the subject of a second section. Finally, in a third section I comment on examples of several aspects amenable to database use and that might be annotated using any of the three TEI-complying procedures described.