What is T-PEN?

T-PEN (Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Notation) is a digital tool for scholars who use digital images of unpublished manuscripts that are housed in digital repositories throughout the world. T-PEN will provide a fully-equipped digital workspace in which the scholar -- while constantly viewing the manuscript images -- transcribes line by line, makes notes about problematic paleographic features, documents glosses and corrections or revisions to the manuscript, and may—either during transcription or after further research—add interpretative or bibliographic information pertaining to particular lines or larger sections of the text. With this tool, the transcribed text can also be immediately encoded with XML markup to indicate any given feature of the text (e.g., a rubric, colophon, gloss, lemma, correction, quire signature, citation, etc.).

This blog will track the 18 months of software development and testing we have planned. This project is being funded by both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.