Under the auspices of a Ruby Grant, I received support for the preparation of a partially annotated online edition of Justus Lipsius's Sixe Bookes of Politickes, translated by William Jones (London, 1594). Murdock funds permitted me to purchase several software packages - including Oxygen, Softquad, ElfXML, and Turbo XML - in order to learn the basics of XML and for possible use in the annotation. I received a good deal of advice and technical assistance from persons associated with the EEBO project at the University of Michigan,and was eventually able to convert the SGML DTD used for their work into an XML DTD. Ironically enough, it turned out that after lots of time spent trying to figure out several complicated XML editors, most of which run on Windows, the best editor for our purposes was the least expensive: Oxygen. This package was developed by a small software company in Rumania and it runs on several platforms, including Mac OSX as well as Windows.
After careful study of the tagging guidelines for the EEBO project, my student co-worker (Colleen Rosenfeld) and I succeeded in producing a tagged version of the early modern text, which ran to about 150 pp. With assistance from another student, Jason Meinzer, who wrote the XSLT script needed to convert the XML into browser-viewable form, we mounted the edition on a local server.
The remainder of the project consisted of writing a 50 page introduction, and of giving a joint public lecture on all aspects of the project, ranging from the technical to matters of European intellectual history.