Encoding an 18th Century Manuscript for the “Lyon in Mourning” Project

Abstract

“The Lyon in Mourning” is a ten-volume manuscript compiled by the Scottish clergyman Robert Forbes from 1747 to 1775. Forbes was a Jacobite: an advocate for restoring the deposed Stuart family to the throne. Through various genres from transcribed conversations and letters to poetry and songs, the manuscript gives us insight into Jacobite networks after the suppression of a major uprising in 1745. The “Lyon in Mourning” project is a collaboration between SFU’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab and the National Library of Scotland, focused on digitizing this unique document. Our team used TEI encoding on images of each page to organize mentions of people, places, and events. These efforts have helped to preserve the original format of Forbes’ document while making its contents accessible to a wider audience. Additionally, we collected data about those people and places to further analyze Jacobite activity. This presentation showcases an overview of our process.