Project and Document Analysis
Consider the sample document(s) you’ve chosen to focus on, and
imagine a hypothetical audience for your digital version of it.
Then briefly answer the following questions.
About the project
- Who is the primary audience? Do they have special needs that can
be supported through the encoding of the document?
- What functions do you want to provide for your audience: what
kinds of searching? What kinds of navigation?
- What are the significant informational features of the documents
that will need to be represented to support these functions?
About the document(s)
- What genres do your documents contain?
- What are the significant chunks or subdivisions of your
documents?
- List as many as possible of your documents’ significant features
that you would want to encode, and provide a justification for encoding
these features. Think about audience, likely uses of the information, and
the balance of cost and benefit.
- What are the significant presentational features of your
document (formatting, layout)? How much of this information do you consider important to
capture? What is its effect on a reader's understanding of the text?
About the encoding
- What kinds of regularization of your document—if any—would be
useful and appropriate? Would you regularize silently or preserve the
original reading? Think about audience and probable use (including
long-term use) of the data.
- What kinds of controlled vocabularies and terminology will be useful to constrain your encoding and help you maintain consistency?
(For instance, values for the type attribute on div.)
- What kinds of contextual information are needed to make the documents intelligible to your audience? (For instance, glossaries,
or biographical information about the authors.)