1994 Prospectus: Caveat Lector

The sample texts and images from the Archive represent an early and provisional version of the electronic archive described above. This is true for several reasons, primarily of course, because the project is barely under way. The B archetype and the critical text represent our preliminary consideration of the text. The notes presently offered are as tentative as the text. We have not yet checked our transcriptions against the manuscripts. Our color digital facsimiles have become available too recently to be used for proofreading. Proofreading the texts for which we lack digital images must be done in July when I shall be in England. The present sample, then, is a kind of synecdoche for the Archive, an indication of our editorial philosophy and methods, a suggestion of the nature and range of evidence we will bring to bear upon the recovery of Langland's texts. The amount and quality of evidence that will be available when we have fully transcribed and marked up the manuscripts, created concordances for them, or made searches of our data base of Middle English alliterative poetry is likely to change the critical text offered here. Lections, which at this stage appear unproblematic, will later be seen in a different light. Other editorial problems, which at this time appear insoluble, may later appear to have solutions.

The hypertextual linkages provided here are rudimentary, less precise than those we plan to provide. To some degree, this situation reflects the limitations of HTML with its restricted set of tags. Mosaic at the moment is a presentational software, and though increased sophistication in its DTD promises to make it an even more useful medium than it is at present, I do not expect that it will soon be capable of the kind of text manipulation required for the Archive. I have, therefore, in this sample edition not exploited all of its present capabilities. I have instead concentrated this year on preparing transcriptions of the texts with full TEI-conformant markup. We do not expect that the primary uses of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive will be for on-screen reading. Scholars will want complex electronic texts not so much for reading as for what can be done with them.

As a result of the impoverished tag set for HTML, many aspects of the manuscript texts easily represented in SGML are not present in these transcriptions. They have instead been adapted for HTML with most of the SGML markup filtered out. I have left a number of the underlying and uninterpreted SGML tags in the transcription of manuscript R. You may get a clearer notion of such markup by clicking the "View Source" button under "File" on your Mosaic screen. Even with that file, entity references for "yogh" have been replaced with the numeral "3." More importantly, in each text, I have, in the interest of quick display in this medium, removed the SGML markers for line numbers which will serve in later stages of development as the bases for hypertextual linkages among texts. So the reader is warned: the present report displays a provisional sample hypertextual archive, not the completed structures of the planned Archive.