Our presentation with discuss a number of pragmatic issues faced by the
Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) development team, specifically
those associated with managing, navigating, and facilitating the
analysis of a large, variant, and dynamic corpus comprising REKn, which
itself attempts to capture and represent essential materials
contributing to an understanding of those aspects of early modern life
which are of interest to the literary scholar - via a combination of
digital representations of literary and artistic works of the
Renaissance plus those of our own time reflecting our understanding of
earlier works. This knowledgebase, which is currently in the
proof-of-concept stage, is constructed initially via adapting electronic
documents gathered through research collaborations and partnerships with
established groups, data-harvesting by various means, and items
digitised by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at U Victoria.
REKn reflects primary (texts, images, audio) and secondary
(articles, e-books, and the like) materials related to the Renaissance
period. These materials – text, visual, and aural - are given a common
metadata structure and textual materials receive a light common
encoding. REKn's data is accessed by a reading interface supported by a
database system that facilitates the navigation and dynamic interaction
with these materials. This environment is centred upon a highly-encoded
electronic text, and it facilitates readers' interaction with the text,
with the primary and secondary materials related to it, and with others
who have professional engagement with those materials.