Build log · Project foundation
Defining the Folio’s pronunciation model and source rights
The project began by defining what the tool could support, what it could not claim, and which sources could responsibly inform its data.
In brief
Original Pronunciation Folio is a transparent late-Tudor and early-Jacobean phonetic model, not a recording of a single historical voice. That boundary made the later tool, corpus and editorial work inspectable.
Define the historical window and evidence sources
The initial project brief chose a narrow working window of roughly 1600–1615 and a utility-plus-content design: readers could test text in the tool while the surrounding pages explained evidence, uncertainty and limits. A compact rule engine was preferable to a copied proprietary dictionary because its reasoning could be cited and reviewed.
The method therefore separated three things that are easy to blur: published scholarship used as evidence, public-domain primary material used as demonstration and rhyme evidence, and the site’s own derived rules and exceptions. The methodology records those distinctions; the editorial standards explain how corrections are handled.
Keep scholarly sources, primary text and derived rules distinct
The rights decision constrained the implementation in a useful way. It ruled out bulk reuse of in-copyright reference dictionaries and made every later feature answerable to a source, a test or a stated limitation. That is why the Build log records technical decisions rather than offering general Shakespeare commentary.