Table Encoding of Multilingual Menus

In this post, we discuss the application of the Table Encoding in FromThePage to the data in the DishbyDish project. The table encoding support is described in the FromThePage documentation.

It is important to say from the outset that this tabular encoding functionality was not designed for the kind of source material we have in the DishbyDish project, but was originally created to work with American historical materials related to slavery.

Since menus have a kind of analog semi-structured nature, it seemed to us valuable to ask our volunteer transcribers to use the tabular encoding (1) to gain a useful digital skill of knowing how to use markdown and (2) to allow for project data to be migrated with relative ease in tabular format into other environments for analysis and interpretation.

For the most part, menus make sense as tables. In the menu shown below, you can see how a section