Opinions Solicited

[Stephanie Wood]

In a Nahuatl-language manuscript I am trying to transcribe and
translate, I have been toying with producing three transcriptions: a
literal transcription (preserving capitalization, word divisions,
punctuation, and original orthography for the sake of historical
linguistics), an analytic one (with more logical word separation and
lines numbered for referencing in notes), and a standardized one that
would have an alternative orthography that might help with electronic
searches (providing, for example, cihuatl, where the original might
have had civatl or the like).  Maybe this is overkill, but I can
envision some value in each type.

When I recently presented examples of these transcriptions at a
conference of humanities computing people, one person suggested
another alternative: lemmatizing the transcription and using the Text
Encoding Initiative to mark it up, with an eye to the future, when
more and more of what we write and read will be electronic.  Just
curious: is anyone on this list thinking along those lines?  Stephanie
Wood