The purpose of Project Infrastructuralism is to establish a research infrastructure with a letter register and a digital publication of the letter correspondences between some of the most important Danish linguists in the 20th century. The work and correspondances of Louis Hjelmslev has the pivotal part of our research infrastructure – an archive, which contains no less than 167 boxes and resides in the Royal Library. The boxes numbered 20 to 43 contain Hjelmslev’s correspondence. We select each letter of interest for the letter register for digitalisation, and then we supply it with metadata. We do this with coding from Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) based on our customised principles to accentuate the relevant semantic information of the letters.
Research assistents Caroline Boolsen and Heidi McGhee, studentworker Mads Nielsen, Danish Center for Language Technology and the Danish Language and Literature Society have tailored a TEI-manual to ensure that the relevant information from the letters are both available and searchable. During the development of the TEI-manual, we have focused on maintaining a consistent standard for representation of the letters as a digital edition.
The TEI-manual for Project Infrastructuralism is manufactured to fulfil our academic requirements based on the TEI-guidelines: Fælles praksis for TEI-kodning, Version 5 – 14/12-2017, which was compiled in a cooperation between employees from the Danish Language and Literature Society, The Royal Library, DIGHUMLAB (Aarhus University), Center for Language Technology (University of Copenhagen) and Grundtvig Center (Aarhus University).
The TEI-manual for our project includes thorough instructions on how to mark-up the letters. The instructions are based on how to mark-up texts accurately and simply, and at the same time describe the manuscript and the philological aspects of the data. In practice, this means that the mark-up is limited to dates, names (persons, locations, conferences and publications), relevant linguistic terminology, certain corrections, underlining, additional notes as well as editorial comments to the contents of the particular letter. If you seek details other than the ones just mentioned, we would like to refer you to look at the corresponding facsimile of the letter, which is connected to the transcription with a ‘persistent identifier’ (developed by The Royal Library).
