The XML-TEI transcriptions of the drafts of the novel La Réticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The typescript and annotated drafts of La Réticence (Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éditions de minuit, 1991) have been entrusted by their author to the UMR Litt&Arts (UMR 5316 - Arts et pratiques du texte, de l'image, de l'écran et de la scène - Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS), under the scientific supervision of Brigitte Ferrato-Combe.
This archive contains all the preparatory documents for the novel, from the first notes to the proofs and correspondence with the publisher, and is particularly interesting for literary, stylistic and genetic studies.
These drafts have been digitized by the Service Interuniversitaire de Documentation of Université Grenoble Alpes, where they have been temporarily stored, and are being transcribed on the TACT collaborative platform, an essential operation to give them full readability and allow automatic analysis or research on the text.
The transcription scheme has been elaborated from XML-TEI with rather simple markup choices, which can be enriched later.
The transcription reproduces identically the typed text, respecting the page layout (paragraphs, line breaks, line feeds). Any errors (spelling, syntax, punctuation, typos) are not corrected.
Handwritten annotations, which are very numerous, are deciphered (within the limits of legibility) and transcribed, with a color code and a font that distinguish them from the typed text. Their location on the page is not reproduced identically; the diversity of locations has been reduced to two cases:
- Additions whose location in the text is clearly defined on the draft are transcribed at the insertion point above the typed text (even when their length has forced the author to write them in the margin and connect them with an arrow);
- Marginal annotations whose location in the text is not specified are transcribed at the bottom of the page.
Tagging has been limited to three essential functions:
- Structuring of the text: identification of the number on the sheet, delimitation of paragraphs
- Precise description of erasures, displacements, underlines, highlights, handwritten additions.
- Identification of named entities :
- proper names of persons or places (Biaggi, Sasuelo, etc.)
- common names corresponding to characters in the text (the child, the cat, the hotel owner, the fisherman, etc.)
The digitizations of the facsimiles are available on Nakala data repository, carried by the TGIR Huma-Num (link to the data repository)
The resource also contains the XSLT transformation sheets that allow to transform the XML transcription into HTML. They are used to build the website which exposes the facsimiles and their transcription (example) as well as the experiments (example).