A Fluid Text Edition of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
This fluid text edition of the Gettysburg Address was prepared by Prof. Paul Schacht's students in ENGL 340, Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age, spring 2015. It uses The Versioning Machine to enable readers to compare the differences among the address' five versions. The transcripts of the five versions are drawn from the website of Dickinson College's House Divided Project.
As explained on its website, the VM "is a framework and an interface for displaying multiple versions of text encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. VM 4.0 has been updated to be P5 compatable. While the VM provides for features typically found in critical editions, such as annotation and introductory material, it also takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by electronic publication to allow for the comparison diplomatic versions of witnesses, and the ability to easily compare an image of the manuscript with a diplomatic version.
"The Versioning Machine is also a tool for textual editors, providing an environment that allows editors to immediately see the consequences of their editorial decisions. The Versioning Machine can be used locally on a Mac or a PC, or it can be mounted on the WWW for public access. The documentation provided with the software not only provides information about the use of the software, but builds upon the Critical Apparatus chapter of the TEI Guidelines to give further guidance to those who wish to use this method of encoding."