2.4 Titles and Naming


Each poetry manuscript will have three different kinds of titles. These titles may be identical or they may be different. Please see the rules below for details.
  1. Title in the <titleStmt>

    This title, which occurs inside the TEI header, names the electronic file you are creating and should therefore be distinguished from the title of the source material. Do this by adding the phrase "a machine readable transcription" as a subtitle, as in the following example.

    <titleStmt>
      <title level="m" type="main">Death dogs my steps</title>
      <title level="m" type="sub">a machine readable transcription</title>
    </titleStmt>
    If you are transcribing and encoding a manuscript that does not have a title written on it, as the main title use the title derived from the first line, as described below. Also, include the attribute rend with the value "bracketed." This will allow titles we assign based on the first line to be bracketed when displayed. An example:
    <titleStmt>
      <title level="m" type="main" rend="bracketed">And to me each minute of the night and day is vital and visible</title>
      <title level="m" type="sub">a machine readable transcription</title>
    </titleStmt>
    For manuscripts that contain more than one poem, follow the above procedure for each poem, but for the value of level use "a" (to indicate individual items within an item). Then wrap all of these individual titles in another <title level="m">. The following example imagines a manuscript with two poems, the first of which Whitman has given a title and the second of which he hasn't.
    <titleStmt>
      <title level="m">
        <title level="a" type="main">Title Written on Manuscript</title>
        and
        <title level="a" type="main" rend="bracketed">Title derived from first line</title>
        <title level="m" type="sub">a machine readable transcription</title>
      </title>
    </titleStmt>
  3. Title in the <sourceDesc>

    This title should be the title which is given to the artifact by the holding institution. This is basically a bibliography, so the information should be sufficient for a user to track down the location of the item, were they to visit the holding institution. In some cases, therefore, the "title" in this context may bear little relation to the poem contained in the manuscript -- for example, this "title" might be the title of the folder which holds the item rather than the title of the item itself.

  5. Title in the <head>

    This is the location which the stylesheet will look to pull titles of poems, etc. for indexing and display. For more detailed rules on how to formulate the titles themselves, please see the section below. The rules for the use of <head>:

    • Each <lg> and <div> can have its own <head> (and thus its own title).
    • Use of the "type" attribute on this element is required and the available types are listed below. The first portion of each value (before the hyphen) is meant to indicate if the title is the main title or a subtitle.
      main-authorial (title given by Whitman on the page)
      main-derived (title assigned by us, derived from the formula for titles (see next section below)
      sub-authorial (subtitle given by Whitman on the page)

Naming Poetry Manuscripts


We have developed a simple set of rules for giving names to Whitman's manuscript poems. Note that this naming is IN ADDITION TO the adoption of a unique identifier. The rules are listed here in the order of priority:
  1. First priority: a given name written by Whitman. (<head type="main-authorial">)

  3. If a manuscript is not titled by Whitman, create a <head type="main-derived"> and use the first words not struckthrough. If you're using the first line, go up to (but do not include) the first punctuation mark OR the end of the line OR the end of the segment, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.

  5. For poems with recurrent titles (like "Leaf"), use the title followed by the first line (following the above rule). So: Leaf [A promise to Indiana]
  7. Don't worry if two poems have the same title. Our unique identifier for the document will enable us to locate the correct document for processing through stylesheets.