Elizabethan court day by day workshop
Welcome to Coding Elizabeth's Court, a workshop for the Elizabethan Court Day by Day project.
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.
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. The primary goal of this project is to trace who went where to do what — and who were they with?
When marking a name (including Person, Group, or Country), try to capture full titles and short descriptors: Sir Thomas Parry; Goerge Comy, musician, The French Ambassadors. We'll work later to disambiguate people, and descriptors can help us with this. Early modern people were not creative in naming their children, so job descriptors can help tell people apart.
Dictionary of Tags
Information about the entries
- 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.
- 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: 1559-05-21. Date ranges can be indicated by connecting two ISO dates with a backslash: 1559-05-21/1559-05-23.
- 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. Try to only use the types on this list -- it's a controlled vocabulary to let us group things. 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)
- Job: for someone just doing their jobs, who are NOT obviously part of Elizabeth's government or being paid by the government
- 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
- This is another judgement we need from you -- where does the event take place? You need to read carefully before filling this in, as entries might mention places other than where the event takes place. It's also OK not to fill this in if you can't tell for certain where an event took place.
Information from the entries
Many of the entries contain quotes from primary sources as well as descriptions of events.
- Marks the opening summary and variable dates found in some entries. e.g. “Court news. May 22, London” can be marked as one label
- Subsidiary or related events mentioned: for example, an event that happens in May may mention a follow-up to it that happens in August. Mark this second part as an [event] within the event.
- Marks an individual mentioned in the entry (The Queen, James Harman, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton)
- Marks a group of people (Six Astronomers, French Ambassadors)
- Marks a country name standing in for a government (Spain)
- Marks places mentioned in the text (Amsterdam)
- Marks quoted passages
- Marks titles mentioned in the text. Use only for titles (e.g. Endymion), not book descriptions (e.g. "a song book" or "a book of poems")
- 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.
- shows help screen
- shows text with xml tags in angle brackets
- default view (in the <xml> view, shows text with editor effects
- saves changes
- indicates transcription/encoding of page is complete
Only hit DONE when you're finished with that month and ready to move on. Hitting Done will lock the month from further editing.