Future of the Book

Having a deep passion for history, my attention was almost immediately drawn to the University of Victoria’s “Colonial Despatches” project presented in the TEI project list. The project is a digital archive containing “transcriptions of virtually the complete correspondences between the British colonial authorities and the successive governors of the nascent Vancouver Island and British Columbia colonies”, among other historically valuable documents. These artifacts provide the history of Vancouver Island and British Columbia from 1846 to 1871 from the perspective of the individuals that were closely tied to the governance and development of the land, its resources and its population.

The original project was created in the 1980s using files encoded in Waterloo Script ( a text-encoding language processed using SCRIPT). These files have now been converted into XML, and the University of Victoria has built a web application to make these files readable and searchable. The files were converted into XML based on TEI P5 Guidelines.

The project provides a detailed guideline that outlines the mark-up scheme used for each record. This document demonstrates how the TEI guidelines were used in the creation of the XML files. The project guide also includes details about the tags used within the markup, offering an explanation for the purpose of the tag and examples on how to use them.

The XML code for all documents in the project are available to the public, making this a very useful example for our own encoding challenge if you are working with handwritten or annotated works.

Bibliography:

Colonial Despatches: The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871. University of Victoria (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/about.htm

For this week’s task, identifying TEI in the wild, I selected the New York Public Library’s Digital Schomburg: African American Woman Writers of the 19^th Century. This project makes its use of TEI explicit, detailing its use of machine-readable form under a link called “Technical Notes.” According to the site, Digital Schomburg uses Standard General Markup Language (SGML), according to the Text Encoding Initiative Lite Document Type Definition.

On the home page, beneath the technical notes link is a link titled “Editorial Methods.” This includes a comparison of the print and electronic forms of the text, which claims “Not a single character of text has been deleted or excluded from the source documents in their conversion to the Digital Schomburg Edition” (http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/technotes.html). It describes its use of TEI as “literary,” and explains the difference between a TEI header, encoding description, revision history description, and text profile description.

While the project clearly describes its method, the editors do not go so far as to describe challenges encountered during their work. They stick to a descriptive approach to their use of XML. Having scoured the project’s website, I found no trace of accessible code. While the editors are willing to describe their process, they protect it by refusing to share it with visitors to the site. This closes down the possibilities for scholarly engagement with the text, assuming users’ interest in the project’s form is fairly superficial.

The link to the Digital Schomburg project can be found here: http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/technotes.html

‘Vincent van Gogh – The Letters’ is a “scholarly edition of all extant letters (902) sent by or to Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)” (TEI, 2010). The TEI project page notes that, “Van Gogh’s correspondence is a unique resource for the insight it provides into both his artistic practice and his personal life. The full digital edition is available online; a reading edition is available as a six volume book edition. While intended for a scholarly audience, the edition is expected to serve the interest of a much wider public” (TEI, 2010).

The project, which is hosted by the Huygens Instituut, in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, provides for each letter, “a zoomable facsimile, a transcription of the original text (mostly Dutch or French), a new translation into English, and extensive annotation. More than 2000 illustrations are given of the works of art that Van Gogh mentions in his letters. Introductory essays discuss Van Gogh, his letters and his circle. Other material includes a timeline, maps, indices and a bibliography” (TEI, 2010).

Interestingly, the TEI project page also notes that, “the project started before the era of the web, and it was only later decided the web would be its main publication platform. The letters and annotations were created in a word-processing program and later converted semi-automatically into TEI (something that you probably want to avoid doing)” (TEI, 2010). It also describes how the project, “created one TEI (P5) document per letter, holding header information (we introduced some new header elements), facsimile information, transcription, translation and annotation. Other TEI documents hold secondary texts such as the essays and bibliography” (TEI, 2010).

The website itself describes the use of XML generally – though it takes a bit of searching to find the link (under ‘About this edition’ – ‘The web edition’). It notes that: “This edition, like many modern digital editions, is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents. XML is a standard for the creation of documents in which the document text is interspersed with ‘tags’, brief labels that describe the nature and properties of the text fragments that they surround. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has proposed guidelines for the names and types of the tags to be employed in humanities texts. Out of the 400+ existing tags, a so-called ‘schema’ can be created that contains exactly those tags that are applicable to a certain type of document (such as a letter that is prepared for a scholarly edition). New tags can be defined when the existing tagset is insufficient. The schema describes the required and permitted tags in a class of XML documents. It can be used to check the correctness of these documents. A dedicated schema was created for the Van Gogh edition. A number of non-standard tags were used, some of which were ‘borrowed’ from the DALF (Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders) project” (Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker (eds.), 2009).

It then goes on to explain the specific use of XML for the project: “One XML document was created for each of Van Gogh’s letters and each related document. It holds letter-level metadata (title, number, date, correspondents, etc.), the full transcription, the translation, the notes, the textual notes, and the information that connects transcribed pages with images of those pages (facsimile elements). The XML files were created in an automatic conversion from word-processor documents. The conversion result was checked and extensively corrected. The XML files were manually indexed to facilitate searching and cross-referencing” (Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker (eds.), 2009).

I find it incredible to think that this XML was converted from word documents and not born digital!

The page even mentions that, “for those interested in technical matters, we provide somesample XML files. In the zip file we also include the so-called ‘ODD’ file which is used to customise the TEI schema and the schema files generated from the ODD-file.  We use W3C schema rather than Relax NG because the contractors who performed the conversion to XML were more familiar with that format” (Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker (eds.), 2009).

Here is an example of one of the XML files opened in word format:

The site also describes in detail the software tools that support the project. Overall, I am impressed with the degree of detail provided by the project, and their transparency with regards to the technical process.

Bibliography:

Text Encoding Initiative. (2010). Vincent van Gogh – The letters. http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/vi02.xml.

Jansen, Leo, Luitjen, Hans, and Bakker, Nienke (eds.) (2009). Vincent van Gogh – The Letters. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. http://vangoghletters.org.

One TEI-using project close to home is the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOE), which has its physical headquarters on the 14th floor of Robarts. The DOE is a compilation of all surviving Old English texts, some in more than one copy. Each text has been XML-encoded and complies with TEI guidelines. Essentially, the DOE contains all of the surviving vocabulary of the Old English period (around 600-1150 CE). It is searchable in a variety of ways and is one of the best resources in the study of Old English.

Unfortunately, the website gives very little detail about its encoding strategies other than that they are compatible with the TEI-P5 2007 guidelines. It does not make its code available for others.

The project has also not published anything about its methods or challenges. The DOE’s editor, Antonette diPaolo Healey, wrote an article about the move from “manuscripts to megabytes” and the digital tools used by the DOE, yet she does not go so far as to talk about the code behind it.

However, in looking for information on the DOE, I did come across a short paper on the use of XML to create electronic texts of medieval manuscripts. The author goes through a few examples of this, and it showcases a current use for XML. It also has a great title.

That article can be found in the UTL catalogue: Powell, Kathryn. “XML and Early English Manuscripts: Extensible Medieval Literature.” Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1-5. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00061.x.

Bibliography

DOE website: http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/index.html

DOE About Page: http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/pub/web-corpus.html

Healey, Antonette diPaolo. “The Dictionary of Old English: From Manuscripts to Megabytes.” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 23 (2002): 156-179. doi: 10.1353/dic.2002.0009.

Records of Early English Drama, (REED) is an online “international scholarly project” aimed at “establishing for the first time the context from which the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew” (Records of Early English Drama). It brings together resources (namely transcriptions of historical documents related to the topic) from all over the world, including U of T, and makes them open and accessible from one online location.

The project is fairly transparent about the construction of the resource through a document it makes available called the “Fortune White Paper.” It discusses their TEI encoded prototype edition in depth and is accessible from the drop down menu under Online Resources, then Building EREED. It’s quite a lengthy document but if you scroll down to section 3 (Editorial Work: Technology) it starts to discuss their servers as well as their use of Oxygen in their TEI work. They describe their records as beginning in Microsoft Word MS and then converted to TEI-XML. Section 4 details how they chose to work with TEI’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, based on the eXtensible Markup Language. The document continues to give a detailed breakdown of each decision and method employed with regards to the creation of the markup of the REEDs project, and even offers a sample segment of code using a random item. It doesn’t offer a downloadable XML file from within this document, however if one returns to the Building EREED page and clicks the Downloadable Script link, a page is made available with two different downloadable TXT files as well as a schema. The first one is described as “A TXT file of a PERL script, which parses REED document text files, converting REED’s markup into TEI-Lite conformant XML, … [which] populates the REED database”, while the second one notes it was prepared as an experiment and is a “TXT file of a drafted PERL script, which queries the REED database and formats the resulting data as Microsoft Word RTF output” (Records of Early English Drama). I get the sense that these are still examples of how the database works rather than actual samples of XML from the actual records made available online, but it does seem fairly in depth overall. Unlike the Folger Shakespeare example, one cannot download the code directly from the page of the record one is viewing, so the level of transparency is not quite on par, but there is a great deal of information prepared and made accessible about the project online.

Bibliography

Records of Early English Drama. University of Toronto. 2016. Online. February 2016.

The U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission IMLS Digitization Project by the University of Virginia is an online exhibit that discovers the work, historical importance and impact of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission.  The homepage for the project is available at http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/yellowfever/. The collection consists of thousands of documents,including handwritten and typed notes, news paper articles, photographs, miscellaneous printed materials and artifacts which the University has been digitizing.

The project uses XML with TEI attributes to mark- up the resources and save them in TIFF files on CDs. The project also made digitized, transcribed and marked-up primary materials available online the website. The project provides a rather detailed history of  its journey through the digitization project as well as mistakes and challenges they faced. The project goes further to share lessons they learned and make recommendations for similar projects. More information on the digitization process is available at http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/yellowfever-new/collection-digitization-report-1999-2004/.

The the details of its use of XML is not available, but it appears to be based upon the University of Virginia Library’s TEI Encoding Guidelines. The University of Virginia Library’s TEI Encoding Guidelines available at http://dcs.library.virginia.edu/digital-stewardship-services/tei-encoding-guidelines/.