I'm thinking about working on a project a year or two from now that involves a ms facsimile, edition, etc., but in the meantime I would like to know what issues to think about before I get started such as what factors help determine what framework to set up or what software to use. I don't want to do a whole bunch of work on something and then discover that I made less than favorable decisions and have to redo a bunch of tedious work.
So, I am looking forward very much to learning from the primer and from lurking on this list about important concerns and solutions. I suspect I will have much better questions later in the process.
Carol Braun Pasternack English Department University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
--On Wednesday, June 23, 2004 7:02 PM -0600 dm-l-request@uleth.ca wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? (Peter Boot)
- Re: Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? (Lou Burnard)
- Re: Re: Manuscript-transcription correlation (Peter Baker)
- [dm-l]: Overlapping Markup SIG (WAS Experience using Microsoft's XSLT?) (Dorothy C. Porter)
- Re: Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? (Martin Holmes)
- What every digital medievalist should know? (Daniel O'Donnell)
- What would people like to see in a primer and/or series of primers? (Daniel O'Donnell)
- Fonts (Patrick Conner)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 19:30:42 +0200 From: Peter Boot pboot@xs4all.nl Subject: Re: [dm-l] Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 40D9BE42.6000202@xs4all.nl Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Given the standard XML architecture of these editions as these have evolved, whereby textual divisions are set in the content of elements but pages are marked with empty anchor elements (eg <pb/>) this is just what XSLT etc find very tricky indeed. If you can do it (and I have not yet seen this done, though I have heard lengthy explanations of how it *might* be done) you can only do it with great difficulty with the standard tools.
At the Constantijn Huijgens Instituut we have done this (more or less). Our edition of the 'Geraardsbergse handschrift' (Geraardsbergen Miscellany) is based on a TEI encoded XML file where text structure is used to define the hierarchy, and pages are encoded as pb-elements (milestones). Nevertheless, we present our edition on a page by page basis.
The edition is available at http://www.chi.knaw.nl/epub/mvn/geraardsbergen/index.html. I'm afraid everything is in Dutch right now, but from the 'Inleiding' (introduction) option, the xml and xslt source files are available. The edition pages can be accessed from the 'editie' (edition) or 'inhoud' (contents) option. On some pages (e.g. http://www.chi.knaw.nl/epub/mvn/geraardsbergen/f109r.html), there's also a facsimile.
(We'll create full facsimile-cum-transcription editions in the future; this one is a book based publication, converted into digital form recently).
In the present edition, performance is not an issue, as the pages contain static html. If I were to write this stylesheet again, in the interest of performance and clarity, I would separate the milestone handling from producing the final output. I'd use an intermediate stylesheet to transform the milestone elements into full page elements at the highest level of the hierarchy. These page elements would contain those segments of the text, div, p (etc.) elements that the associated page contains. The resulting XML file, would, I'm sure, perform beautifully in a dynamic environment.
Peter
Message: 2 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 18:55:51 +0100 From: Lou Burnard lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk Subject: Re: [dm-l] Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 40D9C427.7030907@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Martin Holmes wrote:
I think Peter's point is a very good one, though; in XML, one must prioritize one hierarchy over another where they overlap; if the conceptual structure is prioritized, the physical must be relegated to milestones.
I think there is a long-term solution to this. I think multiple markups can exist on the same text, as long as they're in "different dimensions"; it's hard to explain, but imagine the text as a string going through space, and the markups as planes radiating out from it.
[... snip ...]
That's right. You can have multiple annotations on the same XML structure. This technique, now generally known as "stand-off" annotation, is currently quite popular in the field of linguistics, to handle things like prosodic vs syntactic hierarchies. You segment your text once, and then you create as many different views of it as you like. Each view constitutes a single hierarchy, and is composed of pointing elements which identify how the fragments of your segmented texts are to be combined in that particular hierarchy. Something like it is described in the chapter of the TEI Guidelines which addresses the issue of non-hierarchic structures.
Your Shakespeare is pretty neat, by the way! How does one get to see the XML source though?
Lou
Message: 3 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:56:58 -0400 From: Peter Baker psb6m@virginia.edu Subject: Re: [dm-l] Re: Manuscript-transcription correlation To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 40D9C46A.3000700@virginia.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
The task Martin wants to perform is exactly the kind of thing that XSLT is good at and could do easily.
I also see Peter's point, echoed here. Until we have a markup language that handles overlapping hierarchies natively, all proposed solutions will be annoying in some way. Still, I have a higher opinion of the abilities of XSLT than Peter does (I've been using it in font development, of all things, so I look at it as pretty flexible), and I'll bet it could handle the XML workarounds for overlapping hierarchies such as the one proposed in the paper by Alexander Czmiel linked to by James Cummings.
But if a thing has got to perform fast, it might be best to use the XSLT to create static pages or a database, or turn data from a database into pages, rather than have it dynamically create pages from a large underlying text.
Peter Baker
Martin K. Foys wrote:
At 08:49 AM 23/06/2004, Peter Robinson wrote:
If you can do it (and I have not yet seen this done, though I have heard lengthy explanations of how it *might* be done) you can only do it with great difficulty with the standard tools. The problem here is our old bugbear overlapping hierarchies, and XSLT etc just don't have any easy answer to this -- and maybe no reliable answer at all.
I have not worked with XSLT, so this might seem like a naive question, but is it possible to write a bridge program to copy text from a specific starting tag to an ending tag, create a new file for just that text, and then display that file next to the MS image? ~ Martin Foys
Martin K. Foys Assistant Professor Department of English Hood College Frederick, MD 21701 vox: 301~696~3740 fax: 301~696~3586 ether: foys@hood.edu Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition: http://www.sd-editions.com _______________________________________________ dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
Message: 4 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:01:30 -0400 From: "Dorothy C. Porter" Dorothy.Porter@uky.edu Subject: [dm-l]: Overlapping Markup SIG (WAS Experience using Microsoft's XSLT?) To: dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 1088017290.2158fb40Dorothy.Porter@uky.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Hello All,
At last year's Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Member's Meeting, I (along with Peter Robinson, and Patrick Durusau of the Society for Biblical Literature) convened a Special Interest Group on Overlapping Markup issues. We haven't done very much since then, unfortunately, but Patrick and I are slowly working on a web page that will highlight various different approaches to dealing with overlapping markup and conflicting hierarchies. I'll post an announcement here when the page goes live - it's good to see that folks are so interested in this problem!
There is also an overlapping markup listserv, to join go to http://listserv.brown.edu/tei-ol-sig.html. (Also, if you're interested in reading the report from last year's meeting, you can find it here: http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Activities/SIG/Overlap/olm01.txt)
Many thanks to Daniel et. al. for putting this listserv together!
Dot Porter
Dorothy Carr Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506
dporter@uky.edu 859-257-9549
Message: 5 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:14:03 -0700 From: Martin Holmes mholmes@uvic.ca Subject: Re: [dm-l] Re: Experience using Microsoft's XSLT? To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 6.1.1.1.0.20040623120952.01d9cec0@pop.uvic.ca Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Hi there,
At 10:55 AM 23/06/2004, you wrote:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Martin Holmes wrote:
I think Peter's point is a very good one, though; in XML, one must prioritize one hierarchy over another where they overlap; if the conceptual structure is prioritized, the physical must be relegated to milestones. I think there is a long-term solution to this. I think multiple markups can exist on the same text, as long as they're in "different dimensions"; it's hard to explain, but imagine the text as a string going through space, and the markups as planes radiating out from it.
[... snip ...]
That's right. You can have multiple annotations on the same XML structure. This technique, now generally known as "stand-off" annotation, is currently quite popular in the field of linguistics, to handle things like prosodic vs syntactic hierarchies. You segment your text once, and then you create as many different views of it as you like. Each view constitutes a single hierarchy, and is composed of pointing elements which identify how the fragments of your segmented texts are to be combined in that particular hierarchy. Something like it is described in the chapter of the TEI Guidelines which addresses the issue of non-hierarchic structures.
Sounds like exactly what I was thinking of. Do you know what kind of markup tools are used to edit texts in this way?
Your Shakespeare is pretty neat, by the way! How does one get to see the XML source though?
If you "View Source", you'll see something like this:
<docroot href="AWW_F_ISE.xml"></docroot>
where the href is the actual markup document. I use the "wrapper document" as a way to avoid hard-coding the XSL stylesheet into the original markup. The markup in this case is a proprietary system created by Mike Best, the prof involved, but TEI versions of the markup have subsequently been generated from it.
Cheers, Martin
Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre mholmes@uvic.ca martin@mholmes.com mholmes@halfbakedsoftware.com http://www.mholmes.com http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/ http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com
Message: 6 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:46:52 -0600 From: Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] What every digital medievalist should know? To: dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 40D9DE2C.5020806@uleth.ca Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
As part of our (coming) website, we are thinking of including working paper, guidelines, project reports, etc. Something I'd like to see is a version of Jim Marchand's What Every Medievalist Should Know (WEMSK) on medtext for scholars working with digital media. Obviously "a primer for working with computers" is too broad; but perhaps some kind of topic by topic discussion of important issues one should know about.
Does anybody know of a good community-focussed digital primer that might serve as a model (e.g. perhaps aimed at teachers or some similar group)? This idea is still in its early stages. My preference would be for something developed through the community as a whole.
-dan
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Home Page http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
Message: 7 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 16:14:25 -0600 From: Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] What would people like to see in a primer and/or series of primers? To: dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: 40DA00C1.6050209@uleth.ca Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
I've had a couple of off line responses to my question about a primer. This might be a good opportunity for participants at all levels of expertise to mention the types of thing they wish they knew (had known) in starting or completing various projects.
It is important in a community like this that members not feel intimidated about raising simple questions or problems as well as complex or advanced. Don't be afraid to say what you think for the list as a whole!
Cheers. -dan
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Home Page http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
Message: 8 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 21:01:57 -0400 From: "Patrick Conner" pconner@wvu.edu Subject: [dm-l] Fonts To: dm-l@uleth.ca Message-ID: s0d9efd1.074@WVUGW01.wvu.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
. . And damned fine fonts they are.
I'm hoping that, down the line, Peter, you'll keep us up to date on here regarding unicode and other font development. Can you tell me whether MS-Word in its newest Macintosh iteration can run Junicode smoothly?
--pat
Patrick W. Conner, Director West Virginia University Press P.O. Box 6295, West Virginia Univ. Morgantown, WV 26506-6295
Voice: 304.293.8400 x491 Fax: 304.293.5380 Email: pconner@wvu.edu Web page: www.wvupress.com >>> psb6m@virginia.edu - 6/23/04 1:56 PM >>> [cut] Still, I have a higher opinion of the abilities of XSLT than Peter does (I've been using it in font development, of all things, so I look at it as pretty flexible), and I'll bet it could handle the XML workarounds for overlapping hierarchies such as the one proposed in the paper by Alexander Czmiel linked to by James Cummings. [cut] Peter Baker Martin K. Foys wrote: >> At 08:49 AM 23/06/2004, Peter Robinson wrote: >> > If you can do it (and I have not yet seen this done, >> > though I have heard lengthy explanations of how it *might* be done) >> > you can >> > only do it with great difficulty with the standard tools. The >> > problem here >> > is our old bugbear overlapping hierarchies, and XSLT etc just don't >> > have any >> > easy answer to this -- and maybe no reliable answer at all. >> > > I have not worked with XSLT, so this might seem like a naive question, > but is it possible to write a bridge program to copy text from a > specific starting tag to an ending tag, create a new file for just > that text, and then display that file next to the MS image? > ~ Martin Foys > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > Martin K. Foys > Assistant Professor > Department of English > Hood College > Frederick, MD 21701 > > vox: 301~696~3740 > fax: 301~696~3586 > ether: foys@hood.edu > > Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition: http://www.sd-editions.com > > _______________________________________________ > dm-l mailing list > dm-l@uleth.ca > http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l > > _______________________________________________ dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l End of dm-l Digest, Vol 1, Issue 3 **********************************