Welcome to the BDMP Encoding Manual!

This website contains the official and most up-to-date version of the Encoding Manual used by the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) for encoding Samuel Beckett's manuscripts in TEI-compliant XML. The BDMP offers a genetic edition of Samuel Beckett's works, and falls under the auspices of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Estate of Samuel Beckett.

The primary purpose of this website is to serve as an encoding resource for our collaborators. In our General Remarks section, they can refresh their memories concerning the basics of TEI-XML encoding in general, and of our project-specific encoding guidelines in particular. And in our section on The Tags, they will find all the information they need on the tags we use to encode both The Header and The Text. But because we think this information may also be useful for other researchers working on similar materials, we wanted to open up the Encoding Manual to the general public too. As a result, we invite anyone who is interested in scholarly editing, TEI-XML, and/or genetic criticism to take a look under the hood of the BDMP, and see how we encode our transcriptions. For more information, please check out our about page. For the most recent update reports, please consult our News and Updates blog. And for questions, comment, bug reports, etc., please refer to our Contact page.