The Digital Index of Middle English Verse: Data Files and Documentation

Source data and documentation for the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), an open-access bibliographic register of the surviving English-language verse from the period c. 1200-1525. Version 2.0-alpha is a transitional release: a milestone on the way to DIMEV Version 2, not its arrival. This version consolidates a broad campaign of clean-up and restructuring — migrating the bibliography to Zotero, establishing Manuscripts.xml as the single source of truth for manuscript materials, recasting Manuscripts.xml, Inscriptions.xml, and PrintedBooks.xml as TEI, introducing controlled vocabularies, and rationalizing citation and cross-reference markup toward TEI P5 — together with the validation and documentation needed to sustain that work. Significant restructuring remains. In particular, Records.xml — the heart of the project — is not yet recast as TEI and still declares no namespace, and the data are not yet atomized into per-item files. That next campaign is substantial and not yet ready to begin; this release is published to mark progress and provide a stable, validated baseline for the restructuring to come. Version 2.0-alpha.1 comprises minor changes to project metadata and documentation. For aditional detail see the change log and technical introduction.