Menota

Available

 * http://www.menota.org/

Description
The Mediaeval Nordic text Archive (Menota)

"is a network of leading Nordic archives, libraries and research departments working with medieval texts and manuscript facsimiles. The aim of Menota is to preserve and publish medieval texts in digital form and to adapt and develop encoding standards necessary for this work. The archive will contain texts in the Nordic languages as well as in Latin. There are now 15 members of Menota and new members are welcome to join the network." (from the project website, as is the below: accessed 2016-06-24)

Encoding Guidelines
The purpose of these guidelines is to define a framework for machine-readable editions of medieval Nordic texts. These guidelines are recommended for any scholar who wishes to produce detailed, machine-readable editions of primary works, that is, medieval Nordic manuscripts. Menota is based on the scheme defined by the Text Encoding Initiative. It defines further extensions based primarily on two major differences between Medieval Nordic texts and most other comporable corpora:

1. A very large degree of orthographical variation. This makes linguistic analysis difficult because of the difficulty in searching for words on the basis of a lemma. The compilation of glossaries, for example, cannot be done in any systematic way.

2. A very large degree of abbreviation of letters, groups of letters, words and so on.

The two problems are dealt with by breaking the text into 3 prototypical levels, where the text is encoded in its abbreviated form, in its expanded form and in a normalised orthography. These textual levels constitute the primary difference between Menota and standard TEI. Texts can be encoded on only one of these levels (typically the diplomatic), but can easily can be extended to two or more levels, thus making it more versatile than traditional editions, which are restricted to representing the text in only one way.