The close examination of manuscripts has always been a crucial part in the creation of literary and historical editions, but much of the detail garnered from this work remains absent from the edition. The Genetic Edition bring the focus to this process: the examination of the writing process and its materials; "to find the crucial moments in the composition process" [4]. This paper will investigate some similarities and differences between two ongoing projects at the Moore Institute in NUIG. Both projects are using TEI P5 to create genetic editions of manuscript-based texts, and we hope to address here whether the apparently vast differences between the two editions can be bridged by any common features that might help to determine a uniform method for encoding genetic manuscript editions in future.

The subject of the first edition is Thomas Moore's long Romantic Orientalist poem Lalla Rookh, which was first published in 1817, and enjoyed widespread fame and popular success for much of the remainder of the nineteenth century [7]. A new edition of the poem is being created for the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive, and will aim to visualise and shed light on Moore's compositional processes through a genetic analysis of the three extant manuscript drafts of the poem and its corrected proof copy.

The second case study represents the work on kundige bok, one of Göttingen's town records, containing late medieval town law [5]. Due to the fact that this law was frequently subject to change, the text itself was revised over and over again, giving evidence for its frequent use and its dynamic nature. What has come to us is, thus, a multi-layered text in which all layers represent a different (e.g. chronological) stage of the town law.

While the two case studies are apparently very different - one, a modern literary manuscript; the other, a medieval historical text - they both give rise to issues about how best to visualise and encode textual genetics. In our paper, we plan to compare the two projects as a means of investigating areas of convergence and divergence, and address some of the following questions:

Each project shows certain ways of dealing with individual problems of Genetic Editions. Are the two case studies characterised by similar approaches, or are they simply too different to be handled in the same way? Does the comparison of the case studies point towards a generic approach to encoding Genetic Editions within the TEI, and if so, to what extent?

Bibliography

• Biasi, Pierre-Marc de, and Ingrid Wassenaar. What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation. Drafts. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 26-58.
• Ferrer, Daniel. Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism. Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. 48-59.
• Grésillon, A. Eléments de critique génétique. Lire les manuscrits modernes. Paris, 2004.
• Van Hulle, Dirk. The Inclusion of Paralipomena in Gentic Editions, Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, 2005.
• Rehbein, Malte. Reconstructing the Textual Evolution of a Medieval Manuscript, in: LLC (forthcoming)
• Robinson, Peter M. W. "The One Text and the Many Texts." Making Texts for the Next Century. Special Issue of Literary & Linguistic Computing 15.1 (2000): 5-14
• Tonra, Justin. "Encoding Lalla Rookh for the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive". Proceedings of the TEI@Galway Symposium. Ed. Malte Rehbein. 2008 (forthcoming).