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Writer's pictureDanielle Richards

Introducing the Lili Elbe Digital Archive!

Anyone who knows me well will have heard about the Lili Elbe Archive at least 10 times in the last 3 years. I've been working on the project since Spring of 2017 as a technical editor. This work included editing and coding primarily.



If you check out the website, which I hope you will, you'll see full editions of Man into Woman, a text that originally appeared in various forms between 1931-1933. You can see all of these editions online independently, or you can trace distinctions between the texts through the Collation viewer. More primary texts and secondary articles can be found on the website as well, giving a fuller view of the life and story of Lili Elbe.


My own work on the project included editing the text files of the British Edition, Danish Translation, and German Typescript Translation. The majority of my time, though, was spent on doing Text Encoding Initiative on the following editions: British, Danish, Danish Translation, German Typescript Translation, and some of the American edition. This was an entirely new process for me when I started working on the archive. I had a bit of experience in HTML and similar languages, but very little compared to computer scientists. Our work on the project required us to do things like:

-tag all the people and places in the text so that connections could be drawn across editions and contexts could be given. This included working on a massive Prosopography that included all people and places mentioned in ANY of the editions. This ensured that each character was tagged accurately and that there were no redundancies. This really helps in understanding differences across editions and linking the historical information we have to the fictional narrative.

-make sure that paragraphs were properly managed/split

-labeled and account for all letters and diary entries

-proofread

-find and markup all errors from the original printings and rectify the error (while maintaining the original for any curious readers)

-link all necessarily materials like photos into the files


These were some of the main tasks but certainly not all of them. I can barely put into words how much information there really was to manage here, and how much I learned. I'd be happy to answer any questions about my participation in the archive, or any questions about the archive itself!



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