Statement of Editorial Principles
A Digital Documentary Edition
This project aims to produce a digital documentary edition of the works of Charles Gildon. A documentary edition, sometimes referred to as a diplomatic or noncritical edition, "aims to reproduce a manuscript or printed text as a historical artifact. It presents a text as it was available at a particular time in a particular document" (Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 4th edition, 74).
Unlike documentary editing, critical editing has emphasized the creation of a corrected, authoratative text, and the critical editor is responsible for accounting for variants and understanding the composition process across multiple manuscript and printed versions. As Gildon's original works were not often reprinted, as few versions have survived, and since we have no manuscripts, such an approach is less useful in this case. This edition presents a faithful transcription of the text of Gildon's writings as they appear on the page, preserving what may be printing mistakes, along with archive-quality images of the pages for comparison.
The editorial principles of this edition are grounded in those put forward by a 18thConnect.org, which generates the original XML (eXtensible Markup Language) files for the texts. These XMLs are then further modified to better comply with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5) guidlines and then transformed using an XSLT (eXstensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) for presentation. The final XMLs for each file are available for download at the top of each document in the edition.
As a crowd-sourced editorial endeavor, 18thConnect believes every user is their own editor and decides upon their own editorial conventions (See "Typewright FAQs".) At the same time, there are stated minimal requirements which 18thConnect and this project adhere to as well.
- If a word or portion of a word is illegible, an "@" will be included in its place
- Original spelling and punctuation is preserved except in the case of the long 's.'
- End-of-line hyphens are preserved.
- To add an é, you would replace the letter with the HTML unicode equivalent "& #233;"
- To add a lower-case "ash" (æ), you would replace the letter with the HTML unicode equivalent "& #230;"
- To add an upper-case "ash" (Æ), you would replace the letter with the HTML unicode equivalent "& #198;"
- NOTE: The Latin ligature for "ct" (in which these characters blend) is not available in Unicode and thus are rendered simply as "ct."
- To add an em-dash (often used in place of commas, parentheses, or colons), you would use "& #8212;"
- To add a double em-dash (often representing an omission or dramatic pause), you would use "& #11834;"
- To add a dagger (a footnote symbol, sometimes represented as a cross), you would use "& #8224;"
Typewright also has Optional Markup Guidelines which have been adopted by this digital edition. In addition, we have used the following Unicode UTF-8 substitutions for special characters found in texts: