On Wed, 2005-22-06 at 00:20 +0200, Peter Boot wrote:
Hi,
I do not believe that at present there exist many alternatives to something very much like XML/TEI for creating a true digital edition. A facsimile is nice to have, but no substitute for a true edition. What you lose is: ease of reading for all but specialists, searching, text manipulation, selection based on specialised tags for transcription data, etc. (But this goes without saying, surely?)
This is certainly what I would say, and even more your point below, since I think the discipline required is extremely useful and instructive. The counter argument might be, however, that "editing" is important alongside facsimiles, but not necessarily digital editing, and not necessarily complicated markup. While you probably would lose text manipulation and selection based on specialised tags in an HTML edition, for example, you'd retain searchability and core editorial features like interpretation of data.
I'm playing the devil's advocate obviously (and trying not to turn into a troll!).
I also believe that looking at your texts from a markup perspective requires attention to both structure and to detail, which makes it a very instructive activity.
I think this is superb reason for structural markup, and is certainly one of the biggest reasons I find it useful. But when I make this argument people who aren't already convinced seem less than impressed often.
Repurposability (if that's a word) is another strong argument. I often think that may be the real "selling point": if you are going to digitise, you may as well do it right so you can pump out your work in various media and update it easily as needed.
-d
Peter
Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote:
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