The NEUMES Project

Transcription Primer

4. Resources

4.1. Notes to Transcribers - Regarding the Content

• Know your notator. Attempt to familiarize yourself with the notational conventions of the time period and place of copying of the manuscript. Survey the whole manuscript in order to place in context the chant to be transcribed. See Leo Treitler's paper "Know Your Notator"; from the NEUMES website, select "Project Reports", then "NEUMES 2006 conference proceedings".
• Interpret as little as possible. Be true to the manuscript while making transcriptions. Do not correct known errors in either the text or the music, nor complete illegible entries. These transcriptions are tools for research and their best chance for longevity is to be as close to the reading of the manuscript as possible. Use "certainty factors" to identify any ambiguous items.
• Owing to the nature of handwritten neumes and the conditions of the medieval manuscripts wherein most of these neumes are contained, analyses of chant melodies will often yield varying results from different researchers. There could, therefore, be several different, yet equally valid, transcriptions of any particular chant, that is, several "representations of the content."
  

4.2. Notes to Transcribers - Regarding the NEUMES Digital Transcription

• It is highly recommended to work from an existing transcription and edit the content as detailed in this primer, either with the Data-Entry Applet on the NEUMES website or in a text editing programme with reference to the appropriate character data files. See the Getting Started section of this primer.
• Between syllables of text, enter the entity "&space;" in your transcription. You may also opt to enter this comment "<!-- ****** -->" at important places within the chant (e.g., before a long melisma) in order to clarify the appearance of the XML code.
• If your XML document autosaves with the file extension ".txt" (which might happen if you are using Notepad), rename it to ".xml" when finished the transcription before uploading it to a web-server.
• Note that spaces or line breaks within the XML code are not significant for the computer programming; they may be incorporated, however, in order to clarify the visual layout of the elements of the transcription.
• The "readability" of the XML code will also be aided if the indenting of the various sections in your coded model is retained.

4.3. Some XML Tips for Beginners

• If you are unfamiliar with HTML or XML, there are many helpful reference sites and tutorials on the World Wide Web.
• All data must have beginning and ending tags, and typographical errors in those tags must be avoided for the XML to function; the tags will not merely be ignored as in HTML. If you opt to create your XML document in a web-application such as Dreamweaver, any improper syntax will be clearly identified.
• Tags in XML documents must be balanced, i.e., in the proper order. For example, the correct syntax is <A><B>character data</B></A>, rather than <A><B>character data</A></B>.
• XML is case sensitive. Check your code to avoid parsing errors!
• Include comments wherever desired; for example, include lines of code which are awaiting implementation, alternate URLs, items requiring further editing either in the transcription or in the NeumesXML Schema, and other notes. Use a left angle bracket with an exclamation mark and two dashes to start the comment, and two dashes and a right angle bracket to end it.
• An ampersand in a URL is invalid for XML. It must be shown in code as "&" followed by the letters "amp" and a semicolon ("&amp;").