Sample XML below.

Currently this ballad site is being mounted on two platforms: a Microsoft SQL Server driven database and XML driven code. The goal is to have the project fully mounted dually in SQL and XML by the end of summer 2007 so that the project will be forward-compatible. The reason the project was not put up initially in XML has to do with the resources currently available in the English department. The department’s site is SQL driven, as is the EMC site and Voice of the Shuttle.

The ballads in the Early Modern Center electronic archive conform to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, jointly administered by University of Virginia, Brown University, Oxford University, and the University of Bergen. The TEI consortium describes the TEI as “an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.” The primary benefits of the TEI, that is, are that it is a non-proprietary text format that minimizes the potential for obsolescence and standardizes the efforts of literary, linguistic, and textual scholars who are engaged in the encoding of electronic texts. TEI tags define elements of a literary text in terms of meaningful and searchable content rather than visual format. Within the Early Modern Center ballad collection, for example, TEI tags identify the poetic and bibliographic elements of ballads explicitly as stanzas, lines, refrains, publisher, author, publication date, and so on.

Since its inception in 1987, the TEI has emerged as the most widely-used international standard for the electronic encoding of scholarly, literary texts. Its standards have been endorsed by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the Modern Language Association, and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Board. In the forthcoming volume, Electronic Textual Editing, co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions and the Text Encoding Initiative, the TEI is described as “ the encoding scheme of choice for the production of critical and scholarly editions of literary texts, for electronic text collections in digital libraries, for scholarly reference works and large linguistic corpora, and for the management and production of item-level metadata associated with electronic text and cultural heritage collections of many types.” The Early Modern Center’s Ballads Collection relies upon these benefits of the TEI in the development of its own unprecedented cultural heritage collection of broadside ballads.

Pepys 1.16-17 The Ballad of/ Luther, the Pope,/ A Cardinal,/ & A Husbandman

Pepys 1.30-31 The Iudgement of Salomon:/ In Discerning the true Mother from the false, by her compas-sion, giving sentence to diuide the Childe

Pepys 1.124-125 Anne VVallens lamentation, / For the Murthering of her husband Iohn Wallen a Turner in Cow-lane neere Smith- / field; done by his owne wife, on satterday the 22 of Iune. 1616. / who was burnt in Smithfield the first of Iuly following.

Pepys 1.136 A new Ballad intituled, the stout Cripple of Cornwall, wherein is shewed/ his dissolute life, and deserued death.

Pepys 1.164-165 A merry nevv catch of all Trades.

Pepys 1.194-195 The honest plaine dealing Porter:/ Who once was a rich man, but now tis his lot,/ To proue that need will make the old wife trot.

Pepys 1.216-217r The Beggers Intrusion, / Or the worlds Illusion.

Pepys 1.344-345 Leanders loue to loyall Hero.

Pepys 1.404-405 Rocke the cradle Iohn, or/ Children after the rate of 24 in a yeare,/ That's 2 euery month as plaine doth appeare,/ Let no man at this strange story wonder.

Pepys 1.414-415 The Constant VVife of Sussex,/ Vntoyou here I will declare,/ A story wonderfull and rare,/ Of a wife to preuent her husbands shame,/ Vpon her selfe tooke all the blame.

Pepys 1.422-423 A pleasant new Song, betwixt/ The Saylor and his Loue.

Pepys 1.504-505 A Godly Warning for all Maidens, by the exam/ ple of Gods Judgement shewed on one Jermans Wife of Clifton, in the / County of Nottingham, who, lying in Child-bed, was born away/ and never heard of after.

Pepys 4.365 Advice to the Maidens of LONDON:/ To Forsake Their/ Fantastical TOP-KNOTS;/ Since they are become so Common with Billings-gate Women, and the Wenches that cryes/ Kitchin-Stuff: Together with the Wanton Misses of the Town.