Marking up the Edges. XML TEI Encoding Strategies for Indic Colophon Collections

The present article aims at outlining the TEI-XML based strategy for encoding manuscripts’ colophons developed for the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative (PLMPI). Due to the specificities of such material and the editors’ interest in studying syntactical patterns retrievable in such a linguistically and content-wise diverse corpus of paratexts, a generic – yet meaningful – encoding has been developed that can both transmit historical, cultural, and linguistic information and reveal the presence of patterns. Such data may be key in tracing the history and provenance of the manuscripts, their scribes, and owners. As will be shown, we have built our encoding on the use of the generic element , to which various layers of specificity are added through attributes such as @type, @n, and @subtype; the purpose of this choice is that of keeping the hierarchical structure as generic as possible and leave, as much as viable, all the elements at the same level.