| Summary: | Work on the documentary edition of Huntington Library manuscript Hm 114 of 'Piers Plowman' (Ht) has demonstrated that it is difficult yet possible to use TEI-inspired markup in an experimental way within the scope of a larger TEI-conformant project. Moreover, such experiment is essential. Although much productive work can be done with specifications limited to the texts of manuscripts—including texts as eccentric as that of Ht—such texts cannot be fully modeled and examined without the application of experimental markup. The attempt to carry out such experimentation within the context of the larger TEI-conformant 'Piers Plowman' Electronic Archive (PPEA) project demonstrates the need to develop community-wide recommendations for best practices in controlled experimentation. Text, scribal paratext, and codex co-exist in every manuscript artifact and present patterns of evidence—as yet only partially provided for in the TEI P4 and emerging P5 recommendations—that are eminently suited to machine analysis.
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