Elizabethan court day by day workshop

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Welcome to Coding Elizabeth's Court, a workshop for the Elizabethan Court Day by Day project.


Dataset Overview

The Elizabethan Court Day by Day is a dataset compiled by Marion E. Colthorpe and licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This dataset compiles a day-by-day account of the events of Queen Elizabeth I's court for every day of her reign including: her travels, the individuals who came and went from her court, gifts received, entertainments viewed, and more.

The Elizabethan Court Day by Day project aims to mark up this dataset with eXtensible Markup Language (XML). With the help of volunteer coders, we will use the mark-up to extract the data from each entry so that we can see larger patterns in the events of Queen Elizabeth's reign.

Workshop Overview

Here's where you come in. You have been invited to participate in extracting information from these records of historic events by identifying the people, places, and types of events involved. We will teach you everything you need to know about XML, and support you as you explore the language and its usage working on this dataset.

How to Proceed

We'll be using a modified version of Dromio, the Folger's transcription and tagging software, to help us visualize the tags as we go.

Dictionary of Tags

Information *about* the entries:

Event
This tag marks an entry in the diary. You may see events that cover multiple items that happened on the same day. Put your cursor where you think the description of one event stops and another starts and hit "enter" to split events.
Date
contains the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) date for the entry. This tag should be automatically filled in for most of your entries, but you'll need to check it and adjust it, or add it if you've split an entry to create a new one. ISO dates go Year-Month-Day.
Type
This is a classification for each entry that you'll be supplying. We need humans to tell us what each entry is about. We've come up with a short list of types, but we may add to it during the day. These types include:
    • Fiscal: payments for government functions, including the ringing of bells, purchase of uniforms, or acquisition of materials
    • Gift: gifts given or received
    • Legal: law suits and criminal trials
    • Life: a catch-all category for births, marriages, deaths, christenings, house-visits, and ceremonies of rank (e.g. knightings)
    • Performance: public or private shows, including plays, bear-baiting, horse races, entertainments, processions
    • Politics: political appointments (e.g. the creation of ambassadors), meetings of government officials
    • War: military engagements, reports of battles
Where
This is another judgement we need from you -- where does the event take place?

Information *from* the entries: Many of the entries contain quotes from primary sources as well as descriptions of events.

Label
Marks the opening summary and variable dates found in some entries. e.g. “Court news. May 22, London” can be marked as one label
[event]
Secondary or related events mentioned.
Person
Marks an individual mentioned in the entry (The Queen, James Harman, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton)
Group
Marks a group of people (Six Astronomers, French Ambassadors)
Country
Marks a country name standing in for a government (Spain)
Place
Marks places mentioned in the text (Amsterdam)
Quote
Marks quoted passages
Title
Marks titles mentioned in the text. Use only for titles, not book descriptions (e.g. *Endymion*)
Source
Marks bibliographical references to the source of entries such as [SPF.i.283] for the State Papers Online

Please note: this page is currently under construction.