The source documents are encoded in TEI XML and rendered to the browser using Python and lxml, three of my favorite technologies.

There are a few take-aways from this project that might benefit anyone working in a similar area and scale:

• Use a standard encoding format (in this case TEI, but choose an appropriate one based on the source content)
• Use a modern programming language, even in a humanities context (e.g. Python)
• Use modern XML parsing tools (e.g. lxml + XPath + XSLT)

The key advantage of libraries such as lxml in publishing and digitization projects is that it allows the developer to freely mix XML-native languages like XPath and XSLT with the expressive, procedural programming style of Python. I’m still amazed by how many people are “parsing” XML using regular expressions (or worse), or using plain CGI/Perl scripts to serve up content. There are easier ways!

“Free” doesn’t have to mean primitive. In fact I would argue that projects like Pinax can jump-start library or digital archive sites into the 21st century with less work than a grad student will spend crafting a bespoke Perl script.

Congratulations to Thomas Crombez and his team!

To expand the project in useful ways I’d like to be able to add:

1. Other content types besides novels, especially reference
2. Content from other document formats, such as DocBook
3. Native, highly-tagged TEI documents

Wikipedia and its cohorts are by far the largest source of public domain data on the web now, but they aren’t encoded in XML. Publishers are unlikely to use wiki formatting to mark up their content and thus developing a workflow to convert from wiki to TEI doesn’t seem productive.

XML data welcome!