Donna Jan does TEI

A Pause

I’ve taken a pause in the O’Hara archive project, and this blog, but not because of disappointment about the O’Hara project. My pause is only coincidental with the bad reaction from the O’Hara estate. I’m pausing in the interest of maximum efficiency, because I had applied for, and recently learned I’ve been accepted in, a course on TEI at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. So I asked for and received an extension on this project, which is a for-credit independent study towards my PhD at Boston University. I’ve contracted to complete the O’Hara project by the end of July. Because I’ll be so much better prepared to complete it after the UVA course, which is in June. For one thing, I’ll finally have access to scanners. It’s been pretty hard to create a digital archive that includes facsimiles of every page of a fragile first edition paperback without access to equipment and advice. (My post “How not to scan” on March 8 described my woes.) And I am loaded with questions, many more than I would have needed answers to had I taken a TEI course before I began this project.

It’s very exciting to be going to UVA, even if it’s just for a week. I am so out of it here at Boston University—neither BU nor Boston generally is what you’d call a hotbed of activity for the TEI. How I wish I were at the University of Maryland, or at Brown, or in Canada. But this summer I’ll be at UVA! Home of the IATH, which spawned many of the most important online literary editions, the Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, the Whitman Archive, the Piers Plowman project. Where David Seaman was making scanners available in the e-text center for students to create their own digital projects in 1993. David Seaman is teaching the course I’m taking, which is only offered every couple of years I think. And it’s the Rare Book School, what fun to peek into that wonderful bookish world. A bit strange to be back at UVA too, I used to spend weekends there on blind dates with UVA frat boys, back in the day, when I was a student at a nearby women’s college.

So in the meantime, in the interest of maximum efficiency, I’m investigating nice out-of-copyright poets to find a good subject for my PhD dissertation. I know it will be an online edition, to include facsimiles of all witnesses of a work, and transcriptions, and annotations—like the test run I’m doing with Lunch Poems. I’d like to take a stab at a real edition next time though, not just an "archive" as in "a collection of documents." The edition as interface, as gateway into the wealth of documents.

Small, very small discoveries

I understand this much about the four Rossetti files I looked at, the xml file basically held the transcriptions of the poems, that was pretty much the only thing in the xml file. The image html file was just something that was pointed to in the xml. Somehow the header html file derived its information from the xml file too, and that information may have been reused to put a header into the transcription file too at the top of the page, both of these must have come from the information supplied in the ram header in the xml file. I can worry about how later.

It seems to simplify my life a lot just to code the poems as a book, the way the Rossetti Archive did, one big long file. As Andrew suggested, I could code only the specific pages of the Collected Poems that are the Lunch Poems, and leave the rest of the pages blank. But where will I enter the composition date? If this is a diplomatic transcription, I suppose I should just transcribe Donald Allen’s notes exactly as they stand, in the final pages of CP, since that's where composition date is supplied. What I can do with that date, functionally, I don’t know yet--like whether I can sort on it.

I don’t know if these are final answers to some of my questions, but at least they are the Rossetti Archive’s answers. Here's one: do you tag the rhymes in TEI? (Something I was being sarcastic about my first day or so working on this.) In the RA, information about the genre, for example sonnet, and the rhyme scheme and rhythm are considered editorial information, and found in the raw file, the editorial information. Not tagged. That information appears on the "Scholarly Commentary" page on their web site. This approach also simplifies my life. Having other people figure these things out first simplifies my life.

I also found the price page for Oxygen. A single user academic license is only $48, or they say “from $48,” but a departmental license is “from $2,100.”

This is turning into a random notes day. I came across a set of recommendations at the TEI wiki called “TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices” which seems pretty important, the authors are a lot of heavy hitters. They discuss the relationship between the TEI header and the librarians’ MARC system, something I was wondering about. They began considering the connection back in 1998, good for them. Oh what a simple, logical, and clear article this is, I wish they were all like this, they are actually talking about what’s in the header and why and how computers can use it in different ways, what you want to know. It’s not just “on the next line you should type…” the way so many computer “explanations” are. The guidelines give recommendations to librarians who use or create TEI headers, noting the value of consistency in such matters:

it is possible to describe a set of "best practices" that will produce compatible content while accommodating this variety of purposes. Compatibility of content encourages a more understandable set of results when information about assorted items is displayed as a set of search results, a contents list, or an index, and it allows for more reasonable conversion of content information from TEI tags to elements of other metadata sets when this action seems advisable.

Yes, and that seems like a good reason for us non-librarian coders to be aware of these guidelines too. Because what will happen when somebody tries to use (that is, search in some way) this stuff?

Librarians of the future

Maybe I should go to this, it’s a program at the University of Illinois (they have a big library science department there) in a couple of weeks:

"Introduction to TEI," a two-and-a-half-day, hands-on workshop, will be offered on Friday, February 22nd, Saturday, February 23rd, and Sunday, February 24th, in the LIS Building. Experts from Brown University will teach the course, during which participants will learn how to create their own XML documents.

A seminal effort in the humanities computing community, its role in libraries is growing. GSLIS faculty members Allen Renear and John Unsworth have long been involved with the TEI community.

Participants will meet in room 52 of the LIS Building from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Friday and from approximately 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday. The cost is only $50 per person for UIUC faculty, staff, and alumni ($20 for current UIUC students), and you must sign up and pay in advance.

The instructors, Julia Flanders (Vice Chair of the TEI Consortium) and Syd Bauman (North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines), work at the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group on its major text encoding effort, the Women Writers Project. They are both involved in the activities of the TEI and the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

I can’t decide whether this is a very kind offer of the cognoscenti to share their knowledge or a pyramid scheme to perpetuate the grip of the TEI. I guess we all need to agree on standards. The International Standards Organization is one thing, but scholars and librarians need to be working this out together.

The TEI is now embraced by the Modern Language Association, the trade group that represents professors of English and American literature in the US. I wonder if there are competing coding guidelines from the American Philosophical Association, or from British literary scholars, who have a bunch of organizations, some of which are pretty impressive. What are the historians doing about coding and cataloging internet publications, what are the classicists up to? Oh the poor librarians. The TEI must be an international movement, I mean, I assume it is. I guess it’s fitting that it should be spearheaded by English departments, because English departments are where editing and language standards are central. I’ve noticed that some of the people who are big in TEI started out as English professors but now seem to have jobs in academic libraries or library science departments. That's probably a good sign, because that's where their influence and expertise is going to be needed. There’s a kind of morphing of disciplines going on, with library science becoming information science, and the dissemination and archiving of scholarly knowledge becoming a shared responsibility between the scholars and the libraries. I wonder if there will be any role in scholarly publishing in the future for publishers.