From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2005 - 03:57:41 CST
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:17:45 -0800, "Doug Ewell" wrote:
>
> Deborah W. Anderson <dwanders at pacbell dot net> wrote:
>
> > Already in 1990 the Text Encoding Initiative had defined guidelines on
> > how to mark up texts, particularly for scholarly works. The latest
> > version, P4, provides recommendations on mark-up for damaged text (see
> > http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/PH.html#PHDA). For example, it provides tags
> > to classify the area of damage to a text, the person responsible for
> > identifying the damage, the degree of damage, etc.
>
> This is impressive. It supports everything Dean had asked for, and much
> more (Debbie's quick summary doesn't even scratch the surface). It just
> doesn't happen to involve new Unicode characters.
>
It certainly is impressive, and it really confirms to me that any attempt to
represent this sort of information in plain text using a new set of Unicode
characters is doomed to failure. As I said previously if you are storing
information about the state of a text in the text itself, you need to be able to
record more than the fact that there is some unspecified damage to a certain
quadrant of a character. Using markup such as that defined by TEI enables the
storage of a wealth of information beyond that achievable in plain text, and is
certainly the approach I would use for recording texts in digital format if I
was working on a large project such as the Vindolanda Tablets or the Bactrian
documents from Northern Afghanistan ... which I've just been reading about (see
http://www.gengo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~hkum/bactrian.html for a good overview).
Andrew
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