From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 08 2005 - 22:11:02 CST
Deborah W. Anderson wrote at 9:32 AM on Tuesday, March 8, 2005:
>To add a bit of information to Asmus' comment:
>> What would be a nice first step...would be a serious, coordinated >
>>effort by leading paleographers to come to an agreement as to
>> precisely what kind of information needs to be preserved, and for >
>>what scripts or paleographic sub-discipline it would be sufficient.
>
>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)....
>
>A specific set of guidelines ("EpiDoc") based on TEI was developed by
>epigraphers (http://www.ibiblio.org/telliott/epidoc/). A number of
>projects with Latin and Greek have implemented these guidelines.
Two problems in this context with all xml markup:
1) it's markup, not plain text ;-)
2) plus all the markup schemes with which I am familiar (including the
ones you mention here) use non-empty tags for the markup elements, tags
which are basically worthless for overlapping hierarchies of meta-textual
data. (Try marking up a textual feature that spans portions of two
paragraphs and you'll see what I mean.) Of course, that could be remedied
by the use of empty tags, but we would still be faced with the issue that
the features needing preservation are lost when we convert to plain text,
unless their specification is part of the plain text stream.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
http://users.adelphia.net/~deansnyder/
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