Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on March 12, 2009
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2009 24(2):173-185; doi:10.1093/llc/fqp001
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This article appears in the following Literary and Linguistic Computing issue: Special Issue 'Selected papers from Digital Humanities 2008, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25–29' [View the issue table of contents]
The TEI as luminol: Forensic philology in a digital age
Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA 17815, USA
Correspondence: Stephanie A. Schlitz, English Department, Bloomsburg, PA 17815, USA. E-mail: sschlitz{at}bloomu.edu
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Abstract |
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The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore forensic philology in the context of electronic text editing. Drawing primarily on the example provided by the development of a TEI P5 conformant edition of Hafgeirs saga Flateyings, an alleged Icelandic saga forgery attested in a single, unsigned eighteenth century paper manuscript, this discussion explains how literary, linguistic, and transmission-level interpretations can be employed to describe the saga text and to bear witness to its origin and transmission process. It further explains how encoding the metadata described in these interpretations beside the data described in (near)zero-level text can be accomplished without sacrificing the role of the manuscript as artefact and without sacrificing the appearance of the text as it occurs on the page.