Hands, Authors, and Textual Genres: Encoding Early-Modern Slovenian Manuscripts Matija Ogrin, * Jan Jona Javoršek, † Tomaž Erjavec † * Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana matija.ogrin@zrc-sazu.si † Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana jona.javorsek@ijs.si, tomaz.erjavec@ijs.si Abstract The paper presents the Register of Slovenian manuscripts from the Baroque and Enlightenment periods, i.e. from the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The Register comprises digital images, manuscript descriptions and associated bibliography. We outline the motivation for producing this register and elaborate its encoding, which uses the TEI Guidelines, esp. its module for manuscript description. The manuscripts in the Register are described, giving details about their content and origin, physical characteristics, and classifications along several dimensions. The paper then introduces the presentation of the register via a Web portal built on the Fedora Commons repository software, which enables viewing ms. descriptions with TEI element glosses localised to Slovenian, searching over the registry and browsing the facsimile digital images. The portal also supports export of Dublin core metadata as well as the source TEI encoding, making it suitable for harvesting. Finally, the paper discusses some more challenging aspects of analysis for such digital resources, in particular the formalisation of the locations and dates of manuscript origin, and concludes with directions for future work. 1. Introduction Early-modern manuscripts pose problems to scholars who wish to understand the complex phenomena which are condensed and materialised within them. As in medieval manuscripts, precise analytical methods should be observed in order to tap into their semantic potential. Of course, there are important differences between medieval and early-modern manuscripts, but the fundamental methodological framework of research is similar. Manuscripts of noteworthy early-modern authors appear in autographs as well as in secondary tradition. In such cases, the quest for the lost archetype in medieval manuscripts is replaced by search for the autograph and its textual variety. Palaeographical analysis becomes more and more difficult when the individual traits of the author's or scribe's character prevail over the conventional traits of the script which could be dated. Hands become more and more individual, and when they cannot be identified, they offer little or no grounds in order to date the manuscript. Most early-modern manuscripts in Slovenian language (17 th and 18 th century) have only been given a sketchy treatment, and some of them have been, as yet, completely left out of evidence. Additionally, in the 17 th and 18 th centuries many literary forms and genres appeared for the first time in Slovenian language and in written form. Beside the traditional medieval genres, such as theological treatise, sermon, hymn etc., new types of texts in the national language appear in this era, such as early-modern drama, novel, lyrical poem, church-song, folk-song, collection of proverbs, various texts from apocryphal tradition, etc. Some of these genres have earlier only existed in oral tradition, such as folk-song, proverbs, spells and even church-song for the most part: in the early-modern manuscripts, these genres find their way into the medium of written word for the first time. With this great shift, not only did a variety of new textual types appear, at the same time their social base – the socio- cultural context of the manuscripts' authors – changed significantly. Beside ecclesiastics, writers of civil origin arose, even many autodidacts and learned peasants, producing astonishing “new” genres (with strong mediaeval elements, of course), such as vaticinations, oracles, spells and similar. These are some of the reasons why these manuscripts are important for several humanities disciplines dealing with Slovenian national history, literature, religion, folklore etc. and why we considered that it would be useful to have a clear, methodologically distinct scholarly account of these materials. To enable analysis, description and presentation of these manuscripts, we developed a digital repository of manuscripts in Slovenian – the Register of Slovenian Manuscripts from the Baroque and Enlightenment, available for searching, reading as well as download at <http://ezb.ijs.si/nrss/ >. To date, it contains detailed descriptions, bibliographical references and digital facsimiles of about one hundred manuscripts from the 17 th and 18 th centuries, and a list of nearly two hundred further manuscripts documented in different sources but not yet located. In these periods, most of the Slovenian authors wrote in German and Latin, and this is one of the reasons why texts in Slovenian are so valuable for literary and linguistic studies. The basic criterion for inclusion in the Register was thus that the main part of the manuscript should be in the Slovenian language. The resulting Register is still a relatively small collection, but is nevertheless designed to be a constant and vital part of the research in the field. The paper presents this register from several perspectives, current, as well potential. Section 2 presents the encoding of the materials using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI), Section 3 describes the on-line presentation and query system based on the Fedora Commons repository software, Section 4 discusses the temporal and geographical aspects of the register in connection with their further formalisation, and Section 5 gives some conclusions and directions for further work.