Now I will talk for a little while about the TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative encoding
issues and how they are applied in Betamethaheft and a little bit on Betamethaheft rules and
guidelines.
So what is TEI that we have been talking a lot in the past ten years?
You remember this example from the first presentation, the short paragraph on Manuscripts, borrow
it from the Encyclopedic Etheopica, where the descriptive mark up, the word Manuscripts
marked up as title, so you have the start tag, title and the end tag, the text marked
up as text from the beginning to the end, then the comment from Latin Manuscriptum written
by hand and another comment, the Latin term marked as foreign and the translation marked
as translation.
The same text, someone else could segment in the same way because our understanding
of the text should be similar, but apply a different terminology, a different set of
tags, which are still sensible and as long as this person is consistent in the system
he is applying, perfectly okay.
Another person could use a third terminology.
All three variants could then be potentially displayed in absolutely the same way, so if
you look the web page with HTML after the XML has been transformed to HTML or you read
the printed text you wouldn't even notice that the mark up in all these cases was different
because the result is the same, but if you wanted to use this text for analysis and search
you wouldn't be able unless you know which names of tags were used, so if you want to
look for title but you have the second or the third variant and you look for title you
won't find anything because the title is called heading or h1, so you have three valid
XML files here with three different schemas, this way one doesn't get far if one wants
to reach some sort of interoperability, so some sort of cooperation with other people
working with the same sort of program.
And so in order to avoid such miscomprehensions a consortium was called into life in 1999.
It was born as a research project within the humanities and sponsored by leading professional
associations.
It was called the text encoding initiative, the TEI.
With major influences from digital libraries and text collections, language co-operants,
scholar data sets, including ours, it offers coordination, guidelines and documentation
for all those who want to apply XML to the texts they encode.
The goals of the TEI are better interchange and integration of scholarly data, support
for all texts in all languages and from all periods.
It offers guidelines for the perplexed, especially in what to encode and how to encode.
It gives assistance in how to encode to the perplexed and to the specialists.
It is highly flexible and modular and you can customize it to your needs.
So you don't need to use the whole huge set of the potential TEI XML tags.
You can select the ones you need and add the ones you need which are not in TEI and define
them in your own schema.
That preference is of course not to add too much, not to improvise too much, but take
what is already there, 99% of what you may need is already there offered by TEI.
That is a limited subset called TEI Lite and the full set of tags.
This is just a glimpse to the TEI guidelines page which you can of course go to and have
an idea of yourself as to what it is all about.
The Text Encoding Initiative offers you ways of looking at what text really is.
It is a codification of current scholarly practice because it is born from the requests
of humanists or philologists who do their critical editions and who want to do them
digitally.
So this codification reflects the present scholarly needs and the present scholarly
practice.
It is a set of shared assumptions and priorities about the digital agenda in humanities.
The focus is on content and function rather than presentation.
Representation is secondary, as we have already mentioned, it is true for all descriptive
XML.
And the main aim is to try and identify generic solutions rather than application specific
ones.
So try solutions that would work for everyone or most people, not for just you.
The main things to remember are from the point of view of digital humanities, all texts
are alike.
In the sense every text is a text, it is made up of words, it has some sort of content,
it is organized in a certain way, it would have some patterns maybe and some structural
elements that are typical of any text.
And at the same time every text is different.
No two texts are the same, not even two extensions of the same text are the same.
And this similarity and diversity is reflected in the way the TEI XML guidelines treat XML.
Still there are some issues with the TEI.
The unmodified TEI schema offers authors too many choices.
There are still four different types to mark up a bibliographic citation.
So four different ways to say the same thing.
There are three or four different tags for proper names.
There is a huge choice of text editing tags, this is very difficult to see through.
And at the same time the unmodified TEI lacks a lot of attributes and tags that you might
need for something not focused on a text.
You must remember the TEI is text encoding initiative born from the need to encode and
edit digitally texts.
So everything which is not text but other sort of metadata may have its limits.
There are no tags and attributes for a whole lot of critical logical aspects.
We had to introduce our custom elements for that.
There are no tags and attributes for modern publications.
There are no tags and attributes for a lot of multimedia objects and so on.
All this however can be addressed by TEI customization.
And if the consortium notes that some tags are frequently introduced by different projects
and they need to be codified centrally, that's what they do.
The main advantages of the TEI is that it is a widely used and thus interoperable system.
So if you encode something with TEI most probably a lot of other people will be able to work
with your data.
There is a lot of software developed on top.
It is stable, flexible and easily customizable and it is very well documented.
There is an example of TEI documentation for the element color form.
So you can see the tag is written simply color form.
And this element should contain the color form of a manuscript item that is a statement
providing information regarding the date, place, agency or reason for production of
the manuscript.
And you can see which attributes it will take and which other elements it may be member
of.
Now let us have a closer look at an actual TEI XML file.
The TEI XML file should always be within the TEI root element.
So you have the open tag at the very beginning and the close tag at the very end saying TEI
that is the root element.
And inside that root element you have two main parts, the TEI header and the text.
The text is actually the core of a TEI file from the point of view of the text encoding
initiative because that is where the text edition would go.
And the TEI header, that is where the metadata goes.
So everything about the text but which is not the text.
In the case of manuscript cataloging actually, the TEI header is our main part because this
is the part where the manuscript description goes.
The text part is most important for records dedicated to the works.
In that case, the critical established text should go there but also in case of manuscripts.
For example, if with the help of transcript, you have managed to transcribe a manuscript
or a part of the manuscript, that text would go into the text part of the XML file.
The central part for a manuscript description is the source description because the manuscript
is the source of a text.
So the TEI sees it as a source so it is the source inscription is the description of the
manuscript in the case when we are dealing with manuscript.
Let's take a quick look at the source description.
Here in the case of a manuscript, the main element would be MS desk, the manuscript description.
The XML tags should be understandable as a rule but there is a rule shortened so you
don't write out description as the name of the tag, you shorten it to MS desk.
Why?
First you type it quicker and second you must remember each character is a byte of information
so the longer the words are, the heavier your file is and the girl is to keep our files
as light as possible.
So the fewer kilobytes, the more files you will be able to produce also on a limited
disk space.
So for that many of the tags are kept as short as possible.
Inside of the MS desk, inside of the manuscript description, you have three main parts, the
identifier part, that's where the shelf mark goes and the information about the repository,
the MS contents part, that's the information about the content of the manuscript and the
physical description part.
You will be learning about that later today but just for you to have an idea of how the
XMLTI file for a manuscript description is made up.
You always will have at least these three parts in a proper manuscript description.
As far as the text encoding is concerned, the digital edition with XMLTI can offer you
more precision and more information than the paper edition.
For example, the symbol in the paper edition for symbolizing a gap in the text is just
square brackets and some dashes and it simply tells you there is a gap but not much more.
Coding this in the XML, you can say simply of course that there is a gap because some
text was lost, you can specify the quantity of lines that you believe have been lost.
But if you are not sure that this is really one line or that the reason is really lost,
you can add some certainty.
You can say, well I think that there is one line lost but my certainty is quite low.
And you can even add an additional tag about certainty to say you are not really certain
about the reason, right?
Can you see that?
You think the reason of the gap is one line has been lost but your certainty about that
is low because you are not so sure about the reason.
This won't be usually printed if you produce a printed edition from your XML but you could
search for it and it isn't your encoding so that anyone will know what this gap is about
according to your interpretation.
You can even specify that the reason that it's lost, the certainty is low.
You think the actual reason it's submitted, you only left the reason lost because that
was what the original text editor said but your guess it's submitted.
You have also much more freedom in providing the information on the authorship of the changes.
You can specify who did which change.
You can say the editor or in this case the creator of the catalog that in there provided
the term in this way but we think the term should be rendered in a different way.
So he said wust and this is the way it is visualized.
You can see who corrected what from him.
You can also specify the shifts of hands and explain where and who and when added text.
All this you can encode in your text and code.
Here is an example based on bibliography of the XML markup being applied.
You remember the example we had in my first presentation of the bibliography entry and
you remember I said we can see what it is that it's a journal article written by Gori
in 1993 which is a year but the computer doesn't.
We now human passing tells you this is a journal article because you know what I say and it
is through detail opportunity.
You know this is year, you know this is author, you know this is title of the article, you
know this is title of journal etc.
The computer at most can recognize the numerical digits and keep them apart from characters
but other than that it doesn't understand anything at all.
As we discussed in the very beginning one could create a table and assign the names
of columns to have the computer but now we know that we don't have to draw the table
we can simply introduce the tags with the same result.
First we need the bibliographic structure element around the bibliographic entry of
the type journal article and then we gradually introduce our tags, the bibliographic tags
from the ti tag set as long as we say we have an author, we have a title of the article,
we have the title of the journal, we have the issue and the pages and the date for the
issue in the pages you get the same tag but you can add the attribute.
So the level A is the attribute for an article and the level J is the attribute for a journal,
the unit volume is the attribute for a volume and a series and the unit page is the attribute
for a page and you can see here that also the name of the author has been split into
for name and surname.
You can take as many identification number with ISSN and DOI as needed.
And this is the final version, you split the description into the part which belongs to
the article and the part which belongs to the journal and which will be the same for
all the articles in the journal so the analytic part and the monographic part and the identification
part.
In this way if you have did this markup the computers can get any of a number of outputs
consistently so in whichever way you need the formatting you just do your transformation,
you apply the style you want and you can get whichever representation you need.
We don't do the bibliographic markup in TI, we save our bibliographic in Zotero which
is a bibliographic management software that you are probably all now familiar with and
from Zotero the data is directly exported into the database, the Zotero already because
you have the fields to fill so the information is already split there and from Zotero you
can also export your XML or the bibliography in whichever format you need.
Now let's have a look, a quick look at Betamata Heft Schema and guidelines.
So the Betamata Heft Schema is actually a customization of the big TI schema.
The schema is a set of rules applied to XML documents similar to human grammar or orthographic
rules for example in English it is not allowed to say I has or we has that's against the
rule and most of these software applications you would use would underline it in red and
say oh an error correct it doesn't correspond to the grammar rules of the English language.
It is not allowed in the BAM schema which we have defined for example to use the material
key Bellum.
It is only allowed to use the term parchment because that's the term we have defined.
This is a fragment of our schema which is actually also an XML file as you can recognize
and here you can see the list of values that are accepted for the material and you can
see that parchment is in there and Bellum is not so if you manage to write Bellum this
won't validate so this won't be recognized as correct.
Our schema is also reflected in our guidelines which are online and you can see the representation
of the same information if you go to the guidelines for the term material for the tag material
and you can see the list of values which are accepted.
Please take some time to walk around online at Betamat's Aheft guidelines beside the schema
specifications you will also find their recommendations as to the setup of your workspace the workflow
the transcription and transliteration principles and specific guidelines for marking up different
types of files with many many specific examples taken from the Betamat's Aheft research environment.
Finally just a couple of words about transcription and transliteration just as it is important
to speak the same language in the sense of terminology and tags it is also important
to be very consistent with the transcription principles applied as you know there are
multiple conventions for transcribing feeder to Latin script here is a table I have taken
from the Encyclopaedia Theopica in the fifth volume there is an extensive article on the
transcription and transliteration principles and you can see that there is some similarity
but there is also quite a few differences between the different schools and different conventions.
Most of you have met us first in the years of the Encyclopaedia Theopica when we had the
Encyclopaedia Theopica convention note that the BM doesn't work with the Encyclopaedia Theopica convention anymore
because it didn't respect the differences between the first and the fourth order
in many cases especially after labiavellus and we wanted to avoid that we wanted a clear
transliteration principle which would do merit for transcribing the classical Ethiopia yes
and unless it has been otherwise programmed searching for Addis Ababa as it was spelled
in the Encyclopaedia Theopica and Addis Ababa as it is transcribed now in the betterment the heft
environment will bring entirely different results the computer unless you have explained
it to the computer extra doesn't know that same things may be spelled differently
these are completely different Unicode symbols so for the computer Addis Ababa spelled differently
is just as different from the first Addis Ababa as Bahr Dares it simply doesn't understand
the similarities and differences unless you have taught it
so in case you want to work on Betamata heft research environment either in coding or also
simply doing your searches be aware of the transliteration principles we apply here is
a short overview but you have the link above to see this table completely with each character and
its transcription and you have another link this is the table prepared by Daniel Jacob where you
have all the combinations transcribed with a bigger table um note that the PM system is
different from the Encyclopaedia Theopica system it is different from the journal of the European
studies system it is close to the Italian system but with some differences again um due also to the
Unicode necessity we only can use and should use uh symbols present in the Unicode so we cannot
use any custom symbols because we want that anyone can read what we write
in case of uncertainty use the tool offered by the Metapensa Heft there is a link to the tool
from the transliteration guidelines page and this tool can transform the old Encyclopaedia
Heopica style transcription to the actual BM style and it can produce transliteration
from Fidel to Latin and from Latin to Fidel of course there will still be some adjustments
to apply such as germination and introducing the sixth order vowel but at least the core will be
correct as you can see in the example here of Adi suburba it's a bit small but maybe you can
guess what's there and from here you can copy the results directly to the clipboard and then paste
it to your file whatever you need thank you very much for your attention and now have fun
with the actual workshop see you soon