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?)
I'm not a 'low tech' person myself, but I'd suggest you need to distinguish between different desired levels of competence. For someone without a technical background to learn a markup language like XML/TEI sufficiently well to be independent of technical support seems quite hard, among other things because in terms of infrastructure one needs so much much more than just the language (as Peter Robinson notes in his article). On the other hand, it is not that complicated to learn to enter text in an XML editor, and to get to the stage where you can sensibly discuss design decisions with an XML expert.
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.
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