This panel is a product of the Manuscripts Special Interest Group. One of the aims of the SIG is to test the ability of the TEI P5 encoding schema to handle the different needs that scholars face while transcribing manuscripts and creating digital editions based on manuscripts.

In its first days the Manuscripts SIG witnessed a lengthy debate on the existence or otherwise of differences between modern and medieval manuscripts; during the SIG meeting held at the TEI Members’ Meeting 2007, the participants acknowledged that such a difference exists and that these differences come about from specific scholarly needs which depend in turn on the different nature of the manuscripts to be encoded: mostly scribal fair copies (or other kinds of fragmentary primary sources) on the one hand and authorial, mostly working or private manuscripts on the other.

The present panel will focus mostly on modern manuscripts (private correspondence and working manuscripts), but includes also an attempt to compare editorial practices on Medieval and Modern documents and the applicability of a genetic perspective to both materials.

Is TEI P5 equipped to handle modern manuscripts? And are the recent additions to the tagset (namely the <subst> element and @seq attribute) enough to prepare a genetic edition? The inclusion of two overlapping papers on genetic editions demonstrates a major scholarly interest in such an editorial practice. The encoding of correspondence, on the other hand, represents another hot topic, the TEI encoding schema having been accused of not being able to encode specific features of correspondence (whence the DALF and MEP customization proposals).

Papers: