Text and body elements
In Textual Communities we have to include the transcription of each image within certain tags.
The first of these tags is <text>. The text tag opens right at the start of the transcription for each folio, and is closed right at the bottom. The closing tag is </text>.
Tags almost always come in pairs, with an opening tag and a closing tag. The only difference between them is that the closing version of the tag has a forward slash (/) right after the first angle bracket.
For example <text> is an opening tag, and </text> is the corresponding closing tag.
The only difference to this rule that we have to think about is what are called 'empty elements'. We will deal with these later in the course. For now, just remember that most tags come in pairs with an opening version and a closing version.
After we open the 'text', we open the 'body'. The tag for this is <body>. As we opened 'body' directly after we opened 'text', at the bottom of the page we need to close 'body' using the close body tag </body> directly before we close 'text'. This is because the tags nest within each other. The first tag you open has to be the last one you close, because all of the other tags are nested within it.
For example, have a look at the transcription for this folio from E2:
This is the top of the page of the transcription. You can see the opening 'text' and 'body' tags, before other tags and transcribed text, which we will look at later.
Here is the bottom of the same transcription:
You can see 'body' is closed directly before 'text' is closed.
As a crowdsourcer, you will not normally have to open or close text or body tags. These will already be in the transcription ready for you. However, it is important that you understand what they are so that you have a full picture of the tags being used in the transcription.