2020 Essays

Marking and Knowing: Encoding BnF Ms. Fr. 640

Camps, Celine; Lyautey, Margot

This essay reflects on the process of marking up Ms. Fr. 640. While it is tempting to think of encoding as a straightforward process, this essay argues that encoding Ms. Fr. 640 was more than a matter of simply reading a text, identifying categories, and implementing tags. Rather, it was a complex and messy process which required close reading, continuous reflection and alteration, collective expertise, and collaboration between humanists and computers. This essay highlights the flexible, volatile, and non-finite nature of markup, and it illustrates that encoding was not a linear process, but rather was characterized by moving back and forth between pages, constantly implementing new and correcting old markup in an attempt to adhere to new decisions and safeguard consistency. Finally, it shows how solutions to markup problems were frequently sought by considering a user’s perspective. We conclude that encoding Ms. Fr. 640 not only required knowledge but also produced it.