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
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
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
Hi all,
My first thought on this issue is that it looks as a paradox to me to judge TEI as obsolete. How can you call an initiative that changes all the time according to scholars' needs and contributions obsolete? As we know TEI is an effort to produce guidelines, it isn't a static set of rules to follow. Hopefully it shouldn't have time to become obsolete by aiming to evolve all the time. It could be claimed that this is theory, just ideological statements that are in fact not applied in practice. However, and this is my second point, to allow TEI to grow and face new challenges humanists' contribution is needed. I don't need to stress this point since others in this list did it already better than I could.
The second part of Dan's question is more complex and, I think, involves the broader issue of Humanities Computing as a discipline that aims to incorporate either expertise proper to medieval studies - to stay in the field - and expertise proper to technical skills. Even when all the benefits of XML encoding are full understood and valued, for a medievalist it can be rather demanding and frustrating to acquire practical knowledge of mark-up or of any other "technicality" from scratch. It is rare to find the combination of technical skills and humanities expertise in a single scholar. Indeed, digital humanities disciplines require a collaborative work where different expertise meet and discuss, reaching fruitful compromises. This doesn't mean at all that computer engineers to talk to are the solutions, but rather than community based resources (as TEI and Digital Medievalist are together with Humanist and new born soon...) and humanities computing specialists that filter and produce a set of best practices is a step towards the most fruitful direction.
Who is a humanist computing specialist? Someone who has already adapted the available technology (TEI-XML/database based etc.) or, in some cases, who has created technological solutions for other humanities computing projects with similar problematic needs.
When tools become more complex - and we want them to become more complex to fulfill our demands -, the research process becomes more complex as well, enlarging itself, facilitating shared practices, more democratic and therefore more critical.
Arianna Ciula
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Daniel Paul O'Donnell Sent: 21 June 2005 20:16 To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subject: [dm-l] Are markup languages obsolete?
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
Hi all,
That mark up would go obsolete as facsimile become readily available seems to me a preposterous conclusion. As mark up is in use as a means of data exchange in many more domains than digital editing alone, it is in no way possible to call it obsolete. Moreover, facsimile of manuscript material can hardly be called machine readable. As long as OCR is not able to 'understand' handwriting, transcription and mark up will proof its uses for the humanities domain.
However, as good digital humanities scholars we should always question our mark up practice as progression in information technology is made. Because Peter is my colleague I know he favors handcrafted TEI mark up as a means of simultaneously structuring ones thoughts about a text as well as the text itself. This might be. But arguably tagging text according to TEI guidelines (or any other standard for that matter) is a laborious and potentially frustrating task, especially when you're a newby on the job. From experience I can tell that TEI is hardly the way to win over 'digital dummies' to the digital humanities side of the broader argument.
I do think that numerable emerging projects (like Kevin Kiernan's 'Edition Production Tool' (EPT) and Sebastian Rahtz' Open Office TEI filter) are doing an increasingly good job at both abstracting away form the TEI-particulars and hiding the major amount of time and work involved in applying XML by hand. Which is what good software tools should be all about: abstracting from technical particulars and supporting any process in such a way the it becomes faster, more efficient and easier to use. Thus providing the tools that answer to the scholars intuition when handling and structuring text, seems a good way forward to me. That mark up recedes into the background due to such abstracting developments is a good thing. Just like you don't need to know the XML particulars of an OTD-XML file to write a perfectly comprehensible letter in Open Office, you shouldn't need to know the TEI-XML particulars when structuring a text for literary research purposes. The research value is in the act of structuring, not in the particular tagset used and not even in the mark up model applied.
So I'd say there's indeed a paradox. Bolton is right in that TEI should become obsolete in the foreground of digital scholarly edition tools. But as TEI/XML recedes from the editing screen to the file, it will of course in no way become obsolete as a perfectly good means of storing edition material. But sadly, Bolton (as qouted by Dan at least) does not appear to have come to this kind of perception. She just seems to forward XML to oblivion because she now can see a scanned original.
Yours sincerely, Joris
It seems astonishing that anyone would think that a facsimile--even a stunningly good color digital image is anything but a starting point from which work on an electronic edition could proceed (on the understanding that the original will be visited at some point in the process).
An image does not self-analyze any more than an original does, so delivery of linked color images is only a small part of an electronic edition of a manuscript.
I, too, certainly become discouraged by the labor-intensive quality of some forms of markup, but this is in no way to say that they are obsolete. Rather, they are in need of adaptable GUI tools that allow faster pointing and clicking. I use NoteTab Pro for this work currently because it is cheap, reliable and adaptable on the fly at a very basic level, but I'd love something that really was as fast, versatile and convenient as Dreamweaver, with its available split-screen code+result view, each of those views directly editable.
Heck, I'd probably even pay good money for it. As a user of Dreamweaver for some web site projects (of the time is money sort), I haven't yet found anything like it for our much more strictly ordered TEI/XML work, nor am I in a position to write anything myself.
Humanities computing on the part of the humanist is certainly the road less travelled, and this is doubtless not only because of technophobia, but also because of the vast amount of "extra" work involved. In my program in medieval English literature at the University of Virginia, I already had to learn more than one "extra" language (Old English, Latin, and one other medieval vernacular) in addition to the standard modern language requirement in place for people working in periods later than medieval.
Then I had to learn textual criticism and finally humanities computing, the latter pretty much on-the-fly.
Two qualities were needed for this endeavor: Stubbornness (congenital, no problem) and a special hybrid of shamelessness and humility that has taken me years to develop and which is still a bit of a struggle every time I come into the presence of real computer scientists such as those at the annual TEI Members' Meeting with my pathetic little bit of "kung fu."
Will they laugh, or will they help me out? Is my current work ultimately just one big digital boner, perpetrated by a rank amateur who never had any business meddling in the field anyway, or a nifty combination of textual criticism and digital technology? An Caltech Ph.D. I ain't, so I don't have much of an answer to these questions most of the time. I have to arrange not to care. Thus, the virtue of shamelessness, essential to what I call the medium-tech scholar.
What I do have to do, like everyone else in my position, is constantly learn new technology, usually on my own from four of five books, or with a few hours tutoring from a generous tech on the side (Bless them! Bless them!)--all of it while somehow maintaining my status as a literary scholar, a bit of a Latinist, a codicologist...
[Yes, I do find there is a constant element of flim-flam involved in survival as a digital medievalist, in that you have to explain to non-techs why everything takes you longer (time to learn the technology) and to the techs why you are so profoundly ignorant (time to learn the humanities angle).]
It seems to me that we all have to be ambassadors of technology to humanists who may well have gotten into their humanism in part because of math-phobia and/or a related technophobia. Me, I wrote my first program on a Commodore 64 and yes, it was in my parents' basement, as was the chemistry equipment that Dad gave me for Christmas. The telescope was kept upstairs, because you couldn't get much of a shot at the sky otherwise. The oddity is that I then swerved over into what my family thinks of as "professional story reading."
Most potential recruits to digital humanities do not have this early technophile profile. Some may not even know what duct tape is, either literally or figuratively.
With such as these, we need to foreground the playful aspect of our work. It _is_ fun, but they do not see how, nor do they see how they could be having fun in that particular way. It is possible, however, to present the thin end of the wedge here, and also to present more drinks and hors d'oeuvres at special open house sessions at humanities conferences. And back at the home institution, it is also possible to con people into collaboration, sharing your expertise with them, and getting a bit of theirs as well. Get together. Share food and drink and an interest in _their_ work, without mentioning yours much, except to brainstorm occasionally about what a splendid multimedia project their work could be turned into. Have them seeing The Vision before you have them seeing the angle brackets.
Humanities computing could be the driving force behind interdisciplinarity, and a lot of really fun collegiality if we wanted it to be.
There will always be work for which our technologies are not particularly useful--or at last not specially or crucially useful. They can always be applied to almost any intellectual work as an efficient display and delivery tool, or add multimedia presentations that very greatly enhance a more "traditional" form of humanities work that does not in itself depend on digital analysis, but only some kinds of humanities work--that which is at least somewhat quantifiable--can be taken to where the digitization becomes the very heart of the matter. (I bet someone will jump on that.)
I'd say, any digital humanist who has not done any 100% non-digital work recently should probably do so at his or her earliest convenience. Send in a proposal for a paper in an entirely non-digital literary, history or art history conference. It can be a means of re-establishing contact with potential digital humanists, but it is certainly also as good a mental exercise for us as a little digitization is for the non-technical humanist.
I speak from experience. 8-)
PRB
Joris, and all,
I do think that numerable emerging projects (like Kevin Kiernan's 'Edition Production Tool' (EPT) and Sebastian Rahtz' Open Office TEI filter) are doing an increasingly good job at both abstracting away form the TEI-particulars and hiding the major amount of time and work involved in applying XML by hand. Which is what good software tools should be all about: abstracting from technical particulars and supporting any process in such a way the it becomes faster, more efficient and easier to use. Thus providing the tools that answer to the scholars intuition when handling and structuring text, seems a good way forward to me. That mark up recedes into the background due to such abstracting developments is a good thing. Just like you don't need to know the XML particulars of an OTD-XML file to write a perfectly comprehensible letter in Open Office, you shouldn't need to know the TEI-XML particulars when structuring a text for literary research purposes.
The difference between writing a letter in OpenOffice and structuring a text for research is that the former is not necessarily an intellectual effort. The intellectual effort has been made by those that studied people's letter-writing habits and needs and designed the Open Office XML format.
You're right of course in advocating the use of tools that wherever possible hide the complexity of markup. But what these tools can hide is only the admittedly not very pleasant sight of lots of brackets and ampersands. All of the other complexities (e.g. what in TEI terms would be called add's and del's and unclear's and gap's and app's and rdg's and all of these nested and/or overlapping...) are there because digital editions do things that are complex. You need to understand them one way or the other.
The research value is in the act of structuring, not in the particular tagset used and not even in the mark up model applied.
This may be true if you are analysing a text for your own research purposes. But we should also try to create enduring digital resources. For durability, ease of maintenance and mutual intelligibility it is important to try to stick to standards (and therefore, to learn them).
Peter
-
Arianna Ciula -
Daniel Paul O'Donnell -
Joris van Zundert -
Patricia R. Bart -
Peter Boot