I have quite a few textual reproductions planned for this website, ranging from old gay-related books (Starborn, Pyramid, etc.) to poetry to fbi reports to court cases to ... (you get the idea). A few notes on how I approach digital reproduction, then, are warranted.
While I see the value in highly-structured documentation standards like tei, especially in academic contexts, it also carries a relatively burdensome upfront technological cost, that is, it requires a relatively elaborate series of xslt scripts to properly transform into html for plain web viewing. And for the actual value that tei provides, that upfront cost seems, to me, unnecessary—and is part, I think, of why some digital humanist projects are rethinking the use of tei. (None of this, of course, is to suggest that we should move away from TEI; in fact, I'm convinced we shouldn't. But as far as my reproductions go, it is not particularly beneficial.)
Instead, these reproductions are plain html documents, and they carry the associated burden of likely having different transcriptional standards and ambiguities across documents. My aim is not to create digital facsimiles or to precisely reproduce the page as it appeared; instead, my aim is to provide the (subjectively-assessed) relevant material for reading. This means, for example, that the precise positioning of the printed page number—whether it appears in the top left or bottom right corner, or whether it has a chapter title on its opposite corner, or ...—is not reproduced; instead, I provide what is actually material: the facticity of the page number. That number is presented not at its original source location but, instead, above the page upon which it is attached. Like most digital humanist projects, I see the value in both preserving typographic errors and explicitly labelling them as errors borne from the source material (that is, not editor-introduced).
Since these reproductions are rather simple in having extremely
plain html and generally lacking images or
js for rendering or actions, they also have
the added benefit of being viewable in text-based browsers such as
lynx.
Handwritten or typewritten additions to a work are
given in green highlight, while crossed
out, overtyped, or erased text are given in highlighted red strikethrough. If there are any
stylistic choices specific to a reproduced work (e.g., boychick), they will be
marked at the reproduction.
Sometimes, one of these transcriptions will have an
id like Y0001; this refers to
the identification number given by Ian Young in The Male
Homosexual in Literature: A Bibliography (second edition,
1982). If the id has a star appended to it
(e.g., Y0423☆), then it refers to a 'starred' entry in
Young's bibliography. As he explains,
In the present list, works of primary importance (those in which homosexuality is a major aspect or which are otherwise of particular relevance) are marked thus *. Such a classification is necessarily subjective and may appear somewhat arbitrary but should nevertheless serve as a useful guide for researchers and collectors.