Column boundaries

Medieval folios are usually written with two columns of text per folio. We will do the same with our transcriptions of these folios. We call the column on the left-hand side column a and the one on the right-hand side column b.

We need to use a tag to tell the computer where column a begins and where column b begins.

The crowdsourcing transcriptions already have the tags for the start of column a in.

Have a look at this example of a folio ready for transcription.

You can see text opened, then body, then a tag telling the computer which image this transcription relates to, and then the tag <cb n="a"/>.

You will notice that there is a forward slash right before the second angle bracket in this tag. You have just learnt that most tags come in pairs with an opening version and a closing version, apart from 'empty elements'. This is an example of an empty element, which means there is only one tag. It does not have a partner, and the tag only appears once per folio. It is not necessary to close this type of tag.

To tell the computer that we want to start column b we use the tag <cb n="b"/>.

When you first start transcribing a folio you may find that the column b tag is not in the correct place, according to where column b starts in your manuscript image. This means you have to move the column b tag to the start of column b. You can do this by cutting it from where is it in the transcription and pasting it to where you want it to go, or if it is not already there you can carefully type the tag in. 

Here is an image from Q from a folio ready to be transcribed. You can see the top of column b.

When you first start transcribing, you might find the transcription has no indication as to where column b starts. In this example, column b starts straight after 'siempre' (which is not show in the image above). The first line of column b reads 

"por lugares definados. qł canso el ot°ssi"

but the transcription looks like this:

First of all you will notice that the line breaks have been put in, but at the moment there are no abbreviations. As a transcriber you will deal with any abbreviations after you have finished dealing with the text structure.

You need to add in the column boundary tag to tell the computer that column b has now started. You would type in the tag <cb n="b"/> right after the line break tag on the first line of column b. Textual Communities will recognise the tag and will colour code it for you.

You may also notice that the text in the manuscript does not exactly match the text in the transcription, such as in this example. This is something that will be changed later in the process of editing the transcription to match the text of the manuscript. It is not something to worry about at the stage of adding in line breaks or column boundaries.

You will then see the following:

This means you have successfully told Textual Communities where column b starts.