Editorial Approach
With this project, we build editions that permit us to view the text in two states:
A diplomatic transcription that records the document as-is, within certain limitations. To the best of our ability, we preserve spelling, punctuation, use of capital/lower-case letters, abbreviations, line breaks, and any other formal aspect that we can represent in TEI-XML.
A partially regularized reading text. This version is ”partially regularized” because we alter only those aspects of the texts which have no phonological transcendence (in other words, those features whose modernization does not affect the sound of the text). These include the correction of misspellings and the standardization of punctuation. We are not altering the grammar, syntax, morphology, or anything else that would alter the way the text might sound when read aloud. When we encounter language that reflects a particular dialect or otherwise does not reflect “standard” usage of English in the U.S., we will leave the text as-is without attempting to modernize any features.
For each document in the collection, these two versions are encoded together in a single TEI-XML <text> element, using the <choice> element to layer the transcription and edition together.