Decoding and Encoding Welsh Manuscript Culture: Scribes, Scripts and TEI

Daniel Huws’s Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes c.800–c.1800 was published in 2022 to widespread acclaim – a giant of scholarship which ... handed the world the keys to unlock the great riches of a thousand years of Welsh manuscript culture . Containing descriptions of c.3,300 manuscripts from sixty-eight repositories, along with detailed indexes and plates illustrating scribal hands, the Repertory is ... the kind of work upon which all others build . In his introduction to the Repertory, Huws immediately points to the future, writing that it ... belongs to that class of publication which can only reach maturity in a second edition . This case study describes work towards the production of that edition, not as an expanded or revised set of printed volumes but as a dataset. First, we set the Repertory in the context of catalogues of Welsh manuscripts, and in the wider context of digital resources derived from manuscript descriptions. Then we describe the process of converting the Repertory into a dataset, and how this process, while technical in nature, served as a close reading of its scope and purpose. We offer some practical guidance on the conversion of print volumes to datasets and outline some initial research findings. Finally, we suggest some possible next steps for the Repertory, covering issues such as access and sustainability, integration with other resources and minimal computing approaches to analysing and surfacing the data.