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2794 discussions

Re: [dm-l] Are markup languages obsolete?
by Norman Hinton 24 Jun '05

24 Jun '05

1) a lot of people I know would be very happy working with a good facsimile, or would not want a critical edition that changed the manuscript readings in any way. (In fact, I know a lot of theorists [not I] who hold that monkeying with the reading of an Ms is unwarranted intrusion to keep the profession alive and 'needed') 2) no one asked us to play a role in the development of writing systems, or printing, or typewriters, or book production. One could argue that this time we are lucky to have a hand in the development of computer methods - but one could just as easily argue that there is no more reason for us to do that than there was when those other methods of textual communication were being developed....

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Are markup languages obsolete?
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 22 Jun '05

22 Jun '05

Hi all, As some of you know, I write a column on electonica medievalia for Heroic Age, a superb online journal in its 8th year. My next column is due soon, and while I was originally planning to write on TEI P5, something that came up on Medtext has sat in my head for the last several weeks: it was an email from Judith Bolton Halloway (I think it was) that described markup languages and protocols like the TEI as obsolete in the face of high quality manuscript facsimiles (I'm paraphrasing and so might not have it exactly right). What I'm wondering is not so much whether markup languages are obsolete (that's demonstrably not true in a technical sense), but whether there is an easy argument that they are worth it for a low tech humanities oriented person to learn. I'm thinking here of the issues raised in Peter Robinson's article in the premier issue of DM, various talks I've given or heard at conferences. So here's a question: when is it worth it to devote time to learning a complex language like TEI--or any other standards based structural language or computer skill (and when is it not)? What should one expect to get out of going to the trouble of learning them? And what do you lose by (or simply what is the cost of) doing so? I suppose this might be a question for Humanist, but I thought I'd try it out here given the medieval focus of HA. I'm not (necessarily) looking for answers to my topic for my column, but I'm interested in mulling the question over with others before I set cursor to screen. -dan -- Dr. Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English Director, Digital Medievalist Project University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 vox: +1 (403) 329-2377 fax: +1 (403) 382-7191 URL: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ Digital Medievalist Project: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ (@wiglaf)

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Re: [dm-l] Are markup languages obsolete?
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

On Tue, 2005-21-06 at 21:43 +0100, Lou Burnard wrote: > Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote: > > > So here's a question: when is it worth it to devote time to learning a > >complex language like TEI--or any other standards based structural > >language or computer skill (and when is it not)? What should one expect > >to get out of going to the trouble of learning them? And what do you > >lose by (or simply what is the cost of) doing so? > > > > > > The way you pose these questions seemsd to me to indicate that you have > already taken up a position... but for the record, let me assert again > that I think those who do not understand the technologies by which > information is now processed and shared across the globe are thereby > marginalised. If you care about texts and the communication of their > meanings, then you care about markup, one way or another. I don't claim > that our current crop of technologies for handling the meanings of texts > are the best yet, but they won't get any better if the people who know > most about extraction of meaning and its representation say "oh, I'm > just a low grade humanist and I can't bother my pretty little head with > this computer stuff!". Or, to be more exact, they won't be made better > by those who take that attitude. They'll be made better by people who > are willing to understand enough of the technology to bend it to their > needs. When were things ever any different? I guess I've taken a position in that I've committed myself a bit to the field over the last couple of years and it would be kind of disturbing to discover I thought it was all a waste of time. But the challenge "markup languages are obsolete"--or perhaps better phrased, "are a waste of effort for someone who is not intrinsically interested in them" seems such a head on challenge, I thought I'd see what happens if you really ask the question. My experience has been that people who find structural markup useful find it very useful and the arguments for learning and using it almost beyond obvious... and those on the outside don't understand at all why anybody would bother. So I thought, alright what non-trivial reasons as there for learning what is in essence a third discipline for most editors (i.e. disciplinary skills, editing, and markup). -d -- Dr. Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English Director, Digital Medievalist Project University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 vox: +1 (403) 329-2377 fax: +1 (403) 382-7191 URL: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ Digital Medievalist Project: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ (@wiglaf)

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RE: [dm-l] Searching Latin texts and orthographical variants
by Binkley, Peter 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

PS, you might want to look at the Perl port of Lucene: http://search.cpan.org/~strytoast/Plucene-1.0/ <http://search.cpan.org/~strytoast/Plucene-1.0/> . All you would need to do is come up with an Analyzer that runs the transformation rules. We've had good experiences with the original Java Lucene, but I don't know whether the Perl version does as well.. Peter

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RE: [dm-l] Searching Latin texts and orthographical variants
by Binkley, Peter 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

Hi Jim! I don't think the computational linguistics has to get too involved when you're dealing with scholastic Latin. If -nt[vowel]- gets converted to -nc[vowel]- and -ae- gets converted to -e-, for example, then you're well on the way. You lose some fine granularity in your search, but that's going to happen anyway when you're dealing with heterogeneous materials like what you describe. I worked out a few rules like this for a processing routine in Pascal years ago for work on 14th century Latin preaching (Bromyard), and I'd be happy to dig out the code and send the relevant bits. If you do it with hashes and you don't have rules like this, won't you have to create the association between scientia and sciencia (and all other pairs) explicitly? Peter ________________________________ From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of James R. Ginther Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 12:43 PM To: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] Searching Latin texts and orthographical variants I am the project director of the Electronic Grosseteste, a research resource that provides access to electronic medieval Latin texts and an integrated bibliography. The textbase is composed of a variety of Latin texts (most of them under copyright but still searchable). Right now the search engine is pretty primitive, and one enhancement I would like to make is to account for orthographical variants in the texts. Some texts were classicized, while other editors followed either the orthography of a single manuscript or attempted to follow some sort of convention based generally on Latin texts in later medieval England (these are the facts, and this post is not about the joy of debating editorial practice). Ideally, I would like to allow searches to include returns for classical and "medieval" spellings. For example, if a user queried "scientia" the engine would return matches for "scientia" and "sciencia". (wildcards are permitted, btw). Now I work in Perl5, and so my initial thought was to create a set of hash tables that would map these variants since hashes would allow for more than one variant per entity, and the engine would then perform a lookup for each query element. Now I suppose coding into the engine the "orthographical rules" is another option, but I'll be honest and admit that computational linguistics has never been my thing. And, the beauty of hashes in Perl is that they are compiled very quickly, and don't eat too much memory. Now before I go and reinvent the wheel with these hash tables, does anyone know of an open-source method or resource that addresses this kind of problem (I know that Brepols--pardon me, Brepolis...yeesh---has this all figured out but they don't play will with others, so that's a closed door.). My limited scouring of the web has yielded no joy, and so I seek the sage advice of this community. Many thanks Jim -------------------- Dr James R. Ginther, PhD Assoc. Professor of Medieval Theology & Director of Graduate Studies Dept of Theological Studies St Louis University ginthej(a)slu.edu --------------------------------- dept: http://theology.slu.edu/ research: http://www.grosseteste.com/

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Concordancing Queries
by Laurie Ringer 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

I am producing a concordance of the English vernacular texts that scholarship allows as Wycliffite or Lollard in persuasion. I would like to add more texts, and am attempting to work out a few issues on which I wondered if anyone might have advice. For information I have recently been using R.J.C. Watt's programme Concordance (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/); however, due to a significant problem with hyphenated words---Watt's Help file specifically states that it does not treat hyphenated words, which are divided between 2 lines, as single words---I am thinking of switching back to TACT or to another programme. It's been some years since I used TACT. Is anyone fluent in TACT and willing to field the odd question or two which Ian Lancashire's book Using TACT with Electronic Texts does not answer? Or, alternatively, can anyone recommend a better programme? Line numbering: Aside from keying in line numbers by hand (which I have been doing), is there a macro or application that can automate the line numbering process in large numbers of texts in Word or Word Pad? Page numbering: As above, is there a macro or application that can automate the page numbering process in large numbers of texts? NB: the end of the printed page in electronic format rarely corresponds with the end of a Word or Word Pad page. Many thanks for any suggestions anyone might be able to make. ---Laurie Laurie Ringer Assistant Professor of English Canadian University College Lacombe, AB T4L 2E5 (phone) 403.782.3381, ext. 4085 (fax) 403.782.0735

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Re: [dm-l] Concordancing Queries
by Laurie Ringer 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

>>> Abdullah.Alger-2(a)postgrad.manchester.ac.uk 06/16/05 11:42 AM Compared to all of the other concordancing tools I think that Watt's is the simplest to use. Also, what's great about it is that it can handle characters such as <thorn> and <eth>. A nice feature in the program is that you can save the results as an html document, but the drawback is that you cannot save it in xml or any other format except as text. >>>Are there any concordance programs that allow you to convert to xml? Abdullah Alger There are several RTF to XML conversion applications online including: RTF2F0 XML Converter http://www.rtf2fo.com/features.html RTF to XML http://www.rtf-to-xml.com/features.html RTF to XML 5.2.1 http://www.programmersheaven.com/zone16/cat290/35143.htm I must admit I have not used these, so I cannot vouch for their effectiveness (or lack thereof); however, opening a text file (from Watt's Concordance) in Word, saving as RTF, then using a converter to create an XML file might work. ---Laurie Laurie Ringer Assistant Professor of English Canadian University College Lacombe, AB T4L 2E5 (phone) 403.782.3381, ext. 4085 (fax) 403.782.0735 Quoting Godfried Croenen <g.croenen(a)liverpool.ac.uk>: > Hi Laurie, > > I am still using TACT 1.2 when I need a concordance and I am happy to > answer TACT queries if I can. > > I was not aware of R.J.C. Watt's programme Concordance, although I had a > look at the website and will try it out. But I can see already a number of > difficult problems with my corpus, as I have often encoded page breaks or > line breaks in the middle of words, which the programme apparently cannot > handle. > > I have also used WordSmith tools and find it useful, although it is a > different kind of programme, mainly aimed for doing corpus linguistics and > hence not that good in formating and referencing the texts sections. > > Maybe you should also try out the TAPOR tool at > <http://taporware.mcmaster.ca/> > > Best, > > Godfried > > > --On 15 June 2005 13:25 -0600 Laurie Ringer <lringer(a)CAUC.CA> wrote: > >> I am producing a concordance of the English vernacular texts that >> scholarship allows as Wycliffite or Lollard in persuasion. I would like >> to add more texts, and am attempting to work out a few issues on which I >> wondered if anyone might have advice. >> >> For information I have recently been using R.J.C. Watt's programme >> Concordance (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/); however, due to a >> significant problem with hyphenated words---Watt's Help file >> specifically states that it does not treat hyphenated words, which are >> divided between 2 lines, as single words---I am thinking of switching >> back to TACT or to another programme. >> >> It's been some years since I used TACT. Is anyone fluent in TACT and >> willing to field the odd question or two which Ian Lancashire's book >> Using TACT with Electronic Texts does not answer? Or, alternatively, can >> anyone recommend a better programme? >> >> Line numbering: Aside from keying in line numbers by hand (which I have >> been doing), is there a macro or application that can automate the line >> numbering process in large numbers of texts in Word or Word Pad? >> >> Page numbering: As above, is there a macro or application that can >> automate the page numbering process in large numbers of texts? NB: the >> end of the printed page in electronic format rarely corresponds with the >> end of a Word or Word Pad page. >> >> Many thanks for any suggestions anyone might be able to make. >> ---Laurie >> >> Laurie Ringer >> Assistant Professor of English >> Canadian University College >> Lacombe, AB T4L 2E5 >> (phone) 403.782.3381, ext. 4085 >> (fax) 403.782.0735 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Digital Medievalist Project >> Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org >> Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm >> RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm >> Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php >> Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l >> Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm >> Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca >> dm-l mailing list >> dm-l(a)uleth.ca >> http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l > > > > ---------------------- > Dr. Godfried Croenen > School of Modern Languages, French Section > University of Liverpool > Chatham Street > Liverpool > L69 7ZR > > Tel: +44 (0)151 794 2763 > Fax: +44 (0)151 794 2357 > e-mail: G.Croenen(a)Liverpool.ac.uk > > > _______________________________________________ > Digital Medievalist Project > Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org > Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm > RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm > Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php > Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l > Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm > Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca > dm-l mailing list > dm-l(a)uleth.ca > http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l > _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l(a)uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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Searching Latin texts and orthographical variants
by James R. Ginther 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

I am the project director of the Electronic Grosseteste, a research resource that provides access to electronic medieval Latin texts and an integrated bibliography. The textbase is composed of a variety of Latin texts (most of them under copyright but still searchable). Right now the search engine is pretty primitive, and one enhancement I would like to make is to account for orthographical variants in the texts. Some texts were classicized, while other editors followed either the orthography of a single manuscript or attempted to follow some sort of convention based generally on Latin texts in later medieval England (these are the facts, and this post is not about the joy of debating editorial practice). Ideally, I would like to allow searches to include returns for classical and "medieval" spellings. For example, if a user queried "scientia" the engine would return matches for "scientia" and "sciencia". (wildcards are permitted, btw). Now I work in Perl5, and so my initial thought was to create a set of hash tables that would map these variants since hashes would allow for more than one variant per entity, and the engine would then perform a lookup for each query element. Now I suppose coding into the engine the "orthographical rules" is another option, but I'll be honest and admit that computational linguistics has never been my thing. And, the beauty of hashes in Perl is that they are compiled very quickly, and don't eat too much memory. Now before I go and reinvent the wheel with these hash tables, does anyone know of an open-source method or resource that addresses this kind of problem (I know that Brepols--pardon me, Brepolis...yeesh---has this all figured out but they don't play will with others, so that's a closed door.). My limited scouring of the web has yielded no joy, and so I seek the sage advice of this community. Many thanks Jim -------------------- Dr James R. Ginther, PhD Assoc. Professor of Medieval Theology & Director of Graduate Studies Dept of Theological Studies St Louis University ginthej(a)slu.edu --------------------------------- dept: http://theology.slu.edu/ research: http://www.grosseteste.com/

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Posting tips and sites
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 10 Jun '05

10 Jun '05

I use subscriptions as an informal topic popularity meter: most postings on dm-l result in an average of 5 new subscriptions and 3 unsubscriptions. Postings on XSLT result in 5 unsubscriptions and 3 subscriptions ;). Interestingly, posting the unicode website resulted in no loss and some gain. Perhaps a gauge of usefulness? -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English Director, Digital Medievalist Project University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Vox: +1 403 381-2539 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 URL: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ Digital Medievalist Project: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/

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Re: Re: [dm-l] Letter database: languages, character sets, names etc
by Dorothy C. Porter 10 Jun '05

10 Jun '05

I find it useful - and I was unaware of this site. I usually use the Unicode charts, but that can be tedious (since there are now five charts for the Latin alphabet). Thanks, Dan, for a great bookmark! Dot -----Original Message----- From: James Cummings <James.Cummings(a)computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list <dm-l(a)uleth.ca> Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:12:52 +0100 Subject: Re: [dm-l] Letter database: languages, character sets, names etc Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote: > I'm not sure if members of this list would find this type of e-mail > useful (please let me know if you do... or don't), but here goes: I find it useful. > > A common problem in text encoding is locating the correct codes for > "unusual letters". There are various utilities for doing this in > windows, mac, and Linux. But here is a useful web-based utility.You can > use it to look up character names and find their code point (though you > do have to be fairly precise), and it will produce the correct number in > hex and decimal formats. It will also tell you everything you ever > wanted to know about characters required for encoding Estonian. > > http://www.eki.ee/letter/ Well, ok, I actually I knew about this particular site. I've used that and of course there is the unicode site itself, especially the charts page. Also, most linux distributions contain a graphical character-map utitilty that is searchable. On of the things out of unicode recently is their report: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr22/ on CharMapML = Character Mapping Markup Language. Readers might also be interested in drafts of: TEI P5 Draft Chapter 4: Language and Character Sets: http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/CH.html and TEI P5 Draft Chapter 25: Representation of non-standard characters and glyphs http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/WD.html Just thought I'd add that in to Dan's comment. -James -- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l(a)uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l *************************************** Dorothy Carr Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506 dporter(a)uky.edu 859-257-9549 ***************************************

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