That's it for you, yes, and can I put it in my pocket?
Well, a few words of introduction about the origin of this presentation.
We had the idea of presenting three different approaches to the issue of standoff markup.
But as a matter of fact, and we received in the first place also an abstract from Desmond Schmidt, and we planned to...
Desmond couldn't make it to come, and then Mumford's paper and mine are still here,
and we arranged a sort of introduction to explain, to give some idea of the background thoughts about organizing a session of this kind.
So I shall start from quotation from a paper from John Answorth, forms of attention change over time, and says John, we are on the verge of what seems to be the third major phase.
So there are phases in humanities computing, which has moved from tools in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to primary sources in the 80s and 90s, and now seems to be moving back to tools.
So he goes on, we are arriving at the moment when the formal attention that we pay to primary source material is shifting from digitizing to analyzing, from artifacts to aggregates, and from representation to abstraction.
So just to give a more schematic representation of these phases from tools, tools processing digital object, then primary sources digitization representing, presenting and representing, visualizing primary sources, and then now there is a need, a recognized need to go back to tools.
And I think that these three phases were very much influenced by technological innovations, and this isn't taken because of the phases from mainframes in the first place, then to PCE and standalone workstations, the world wide web, and now the semantic web.
So what was focused in the phase of mainframes?
Developing algorithms to process information content, basically.
Whereas with PCE, there came visualization, with Zwig systems, all was about visualizing.
And even more with the world wide web 0.1, remote access and display, that was the purpose of that.
And now back to technologies to process information content with the semantic web.
And so the languages, the languages on which, well, HTML, HTML and XML are basically data representation languages, and I would like to insist on this.
They are data representation languages, not data processing languages. They lack semantics.
And for processing web XML data, there you have these data processing languages, and in particular, XSLT.
But what does really process an XSLT?
It takes a tree, I'm quoting from this paper online by Michael K, who's an expert on XSLT.
It takes a tree structure as its input and generates another tree structure as its output.
So what it does really process is the structure of a string of character.
So I've come to strategic choices taken back in the early 90s.
And I'm quoting this paper from 96 people who worked at the Oxford English Dictionary, the Canadian team.
And they had this clear idea that there was a database community and a document community dealing with different things.
And for the database community working on database, what was essential, the semantics, to be the invariant.
So taking data from one system to another, and we were all at the point of having different binary encodings, it didn't matter.
As long as the semantics was kept invariant.
Whereas the document community cared about the representation, obviously, the document, not its semantics.
But the document, as far as I remember, or I can know markup languages were developed by a document community.
And it says document, not text.
There was a system for the production of printed documents.
SDML was very much in favor among publishers at the beginning.
Because what they cared, it was to produce the printed document, not analyzing a text.
I'm just quoting an Italian literary critic.
His book has been translated into English as well.
The text is not a physical reality, as a document is.
It is not a physical reality at all.
But here, I'm afraid the English translation is not very accurate.
Concept limit doesn't render what I think Grendsbergriff in Deutsch means.
The nature of the text is not material.
The text is only and always an image, a representation.
We always deal with material, the representation of the text.
So what was the decision of the scholarly community?
Am I going to long?
Always from that Raymond's paper.
Attempts to define semantics in the scholarly community, most notably the text encoding initiative.
So I don't know if this is an accurate report, but similarly met with resistance.
Thus, the root proposed by SGML was a reasonable one.
Promote the notion of application and machine independence.
That was the base.
I remember in the early days, interchange was the key word.
And provide the base on which semantics could eventually be developed,
but avoid actually specifying semantics.
So I just wanted to point some inadequacies of embedded markup.
Basically, processing information content.
But also for the sake of representation, the overlapping problem, dealing with textual variants,
there are difficulties at this level too.
There are proposed solutions, liminal.
When the liminal, a proposal back in the years by Manfred Talley,
the extended strings that Manfred will talk today, I think, on this,
all the standoffs and then standoff markup system like Katma and Claire by Chris Meister.
And eventually Desmond Schmidt's standoff property is so.
And the idea of trying to deal with standoff attempts or approaches
was precisely what John Answorth has already written.
We need to demonstrate the usefulness of all the stuff we have digitized over the last decade,
dealing with primary sources and more.
And usefulness, not just in the form of increased access,
but specifically in what we can do with it.
I mean, I think, processing information content.
So one basic distinction I think should be heeded to
is the distinction between data and information.
Document text is more or less the same distinction, expression and content in text.
And I shall try to deal more into this later in my paper.
These two things have different representation with different structures.
And the structure of the representation, the conventional representation
of the expression doesn't match, in general, the structure of its semantic content.
And I think we need both.
Desmond is more extreme.
He says embedded marker is useless.
But I think we need both because each one serves specific needs.
And what I think we need is to find ways to relate these two related structures.
And so this was just by way of introduction just to justify
what the idea of proposing the papers will, shall present later.
Okay.