Week 5 Blogging Response - Espionage in the Elizabethan Court

As my group member Fareh has mentioned in her post, the challenges of which to encode the Babington Plot, is deciphering the script and ciphers. Luckily sites such as The National Archives contains a transcript of the Babington Plot (The Babington cipher, 2016). In addition, there are other sources that have fully translated the alphabetized ciphers used by Mary (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Ciphers used by Mary Queen of Scots, from The Black Chamber.

Hence, the interesting aspect of the encoding assignment will be to incorporate and translate the ciphers into the XML file. The TEI site offers examples of how glyphs and characters can be encoded (see Fig. 2). Therefore compiling examples of how special characters have been encoded will help towards the writing of the XML file. This is truly an intriguing assignment as we are delving into a piece of old text that deals with espionage during the Elizabethan Era.

Fig. 2. Example of transcribing ancient Greek, from TEI.

Until next time!

- Raquel

Sources & Images:

TEI. (2015). 5 Characters, Glyphs, and Writing Modes. Retrieved from 

  http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/WD.html  

The Black Chamber. (2016). Mary Queen of Scots. Retrieved from   

  http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/maryqueenofscots.html

The National Archives. (2016). The Babington cipher, 1586. Retrieved from 

  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/spies/transcript/ma2_t.htm