Much has happened since the last post: The Latin text and the translations display seamlessly with the help of CETEIcean and by now the project has a decent looking page layout. I am no web designer and my CSS skills are limited, so there are a million papercuts and I have no idea whether anything I do is truly ‘up to code’, but I do like the general vibe and my limited understanding is that CSS is easily changeable later on, so lets keep it like it is for now and hope for the best.

Although I had planned to follow up on the translation / transcription of the text of the chapter De Symphonetarum Ingenio with the transkription of its 22 musical examples, I decided to postpone this until I have more time for extended transcription sessions in the library, where I can consult existing Editions of Josquin etc. Instead, I decided to get my feet wet with TEI and see how I could render it in the browser. TEI in itself is really not difficult at all, or so it would seem to me at the moment. I had the chapter marked up rudimentarily in no time at all, focussing on such basic things as <title></title>, <name type="person"></name>, and <term></term>. The only hickup I encountered was getting to grips with the subdivisions of chapters with <div></div>-tags, which I found less intuitive. I assume, the real chunk of work is yet to come when I have to decide on a coherent system for all tags in all chapters.

While I am still not sure about the exact configuration of the chapters I want to feature in the project, I have known for a while that I would definitely include the famous last chapter, Concerning the Skill of the Symphonetae. For one, it is easily the most interesting to most readers: Featuring portraits of some of the most well known composers of the late 15th and early 16th century, it presents a wide range of fascinating sample compositions, as well as Glareans commentary on them. Apart from the content, it offers a wide range of names, pieces and even places that can be tagged, and the music, which is sometimes offered in two variants, one as a riddle and one with the riddle resolved, will pose some interesting challenges in terms of encoding this. So for now I decided to postpone the question of what other chapters I would want to feature and get a headstart into preparing the text for this chapter. After all, it is one of the longest of the entire book and I will have plenty to do with that alone and I figured it would be best to dive into work to get a feeling of what might lie ahead and use that experience to plan my further steps.

Greetings, web traveller! This is the first of what I hope to become many posts that chronicle the progress of the Glarean Project. As it stands, this blog is about as simple as it gets. The page is simply a fork from Barry Clarks lovely Jekyll Now Repository. I might personalize it more further down the road, but for now it serves its purpose.