This edition endows the text with multiple representations of its lexicon: glosses, glossary, list of word forms, concordances... and what has been called ‘hyperlexicon’. And it visualized them in two windows split into frames. The representations have been produced from information coded into the text, as is proper of electronic writing – which is not so much a format as a matrix of formats (a format here being a particular selection and presentation of lexical content).

The information is added to the electronic transcription of the text, and is formulated in the syntax of XML – eXtensible Markup Language.

XML requires that the content to be ‘marked’ be enclosed between two pairs of angle brackets with opening and closing tag freely chosen (XML has free semantics),

<tag>content</tag>

Within the first pair of brackets ‘attributes’ can be added of the type name="value":

W  word
   l  lemma
   c  word class
   o  homography
   s  syntax (government)
   g  grammar (morphology)
   t  translation (Italian)

<W l="gefrignan" c="v" s="a+" g="p1p" t="apprendere">gefrunon</W>

reads:
   - the word (W) gefrunon is a form of the lemma (l) gefrignan,
   - its class (c) is the verb (v),
   - it governs (s) an accusative and a complement clause (a+),
   - its morphology (g) is preterit 1 plural (p1p), and
   - in the context its Italian translation (t) is apprendere.

The homography attribute, o, distinguishes homograph lemmas with the same word class,

<W l="metan" c="v" o="o1" s="a" g="p2p" t="misurare">mæton</W>
<W l="metan" c="v" o="o2" s="a" g="p3s" t="incontrare">mette</W>

<W l="sæ" c="m" o="o1" g="as" t="mare">sæ</W>
<W l="sæ" c="f" o="o1" g="as" t="mare">sæ</W>

Other pairs of brackets and other tags mark lines (with number), sections or fitt (with number) and the whole text (with title and abbreviation); their configuration is chiastic:

<POEMA titolo="Beowulf" abbr="Be">
  <FITT num="I">
    <V n="53">
      <W...>...</W>
    </V>
  </FITT>
</POEMA>

XML syntax does not allow straddling: elements must be either flanked or nested.

The text and the representations of its lexicon are distributed in two windows divided into frames: Spogli and Iperlessico – that is, sorted listings of the lexicon and their hypertextual linking.

The three-tiered menu at the top of the window gives the options, with their targets in the five frames below (cross-labelled).

Text with interlinear glosses. These are a full glossary in situ, with the lemmas in the sequential order of the words in the line and with full lexical information according to context. Text and glosses can also be called in different frames. The abbreviations can be expanded by positioning the cursor on them.

An analytic glossary is also provided: lemmas and all their forms. Here, too, abbreviations can be expanded by positioning the cursor on them.

This is a list of all the word forms, with matching lemmas and homographs distinguished.

There is also an Italian–Old English glossary, which consists in the lemmas that have been used in the translation attribute, t.

Concordances are by lemmas.

Glossary, list of word forms, translation glossary and concordance are interlinked with each other. By clicking a lemma of the glossary in one frame one can see its concordance in another, and the other way round; and so for glossary and list of word forms, and glossary and translation glossary. All the numbers in the four listings are linked with the lines of the poem, and by clicking them one can see the contexts.

The compounds are listed under the simple lemmas that make them, either as first or second part. A click links poetic words (those used only in poetry) to the lines in which they appear.

The five listings of reggenze gather information stored in the syntax attribute, s – the government of verbs, nouns, adjectives and prepositions. All the verbs are grouped according to the number of complements, zero to three (case/s or clause or both together); a number of nouns and adjectives also govern cases and clauses; pre- and post-positions with their cases are listed separately for comparison (showing which pre are also post).

Frequency lists of lemmas and distribution of word classes together with compounds and poetic words. This distribution is also compared with that of the corpus as a whole (through the difference between actual and expected frequency), and is shown in a graph that gives a profile of the lexical style of the text. Values are significant when they exceed ±2. The graphs of all the texts tagged so far are given for comparison.
For these and other graphs see The lexical space of Old English poetry: pdf.

This is the analytic glossary of all the corpus that has been tagged so far. All the abbreviations, including those of the poems, are expanded by positioning the cursor. At the end of the file are the total numbers of forms and lemmas; in Abbreviazioni there is the list of texts and editions used.

Text with flanking Italian translation; linguistic notes; list of abbreviations (Abbreviazioni).

The glosses can also be called call up one by one as required. The window of the hyperlexicon opens with the bare text in the top-left frame: its words change colour when the cursor passes over them – this means that they are clickable. And by clicking any word anywhere in the text one has its gloss visualised in the frame underneath. This might be the electronic version of a traditional glossary, with its one-word-at-a-time consultation. But the gloss itself is clickable, and by clicking on its various parts one can have, displayed in the other four frames, the full glossary entry, the concordance entry, the entry in the list of word forms and that in the Italian–Old English glossary. This tiled window gives a full profile of the word.