Literary and Linguistic Computing - Advance Access

SusTEInability of linguistic resources through feature structures

Witt, A., Rehm, G., Hinrichs, E., Lehmberg, T., Stegmann, J. — 2009-06-11

This article shows that the TEI tag set for feature structures can be adopted to represent a heterogeneous set of linguistic corpora. The majority of corpora is annotated using markup languages that are based on the Annotation Graph framework, the upcoming Linguistic Annotation Format ISO standard, or according to tag sets defined by or based upon the TEI guidelines. A unified representation comprises the separation of conceptually different annotation layers contained in the original corpus data (e.g. syntax, phonology, and semantics) into multiple XML files. These annotation layers are linked to each other implicitly by the identical textual content of all files. A suitable data structure for the representation of these annotations is a multi-rooted tree that again can be represented by the TEI and ISO tag set for feature structures. The mapping process and representational issues are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the use of the TEI tag set for feature structures as a storage and exchange format for linguistically annotated data.

Converting Saint Paul: A new TEI P5 edition of The Conversion of Saint Paul using stand-off methodology

Cummings, J. — 2009-06-05

This article reports on the details behind a poster presented a the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Members' Meeting at the University of Maryland, College Park, in November 2007. It looks at the creation of of af scholarly electronic edition of a late-medieval play, The Conversion of Saint Paul from Bodleian MS Digby 133 using TEI P5 XML. In addition to exploring various new features available in the TEI P5 Guidelines, it also examines the methodology used to create the text, up-scaling from purely presentation markup to descriptive markup, and how this might simplify the creation of such editions. In an attempt to create an interoperable, flexible, and agile edition, it stores anything not directly related to the transcription of the text in separate files in a stand-off manner. In an attempt to experiment with creating a resource which leverages the advantages of networked editions, it documents the attempt to interoperate with the Middle English Dictionary. Although this first appears to be a failure, it highlights some of the inherent problems in attempting to build editions that are dependent on the resources of others. The article concludes with an urge to text encoders to make more of an effort to share examples of, both good and bad, community practice.

Reconstructing the textual evolution of a medieval manuscript

Rehbein, M. — 2009-06-02

This article presents the results of the work on kundige bok, one of Göttingen's town records, containing late medieval town law. Due to the fact that this law was frequently subject to change, the text itself was revised over and over again, giving evidence for its frequent use and its dynamic nature. What has come to us, is, thus, a multi-layered text in which all layers represent a different (e.g. chronological) stage of the town law. Consequently they have to be regarded, processed and represented equally. A dynamic text like this requires a dynamic representation. The article shows how an electronic scholarly edition of a multi-layered text can be created and used, first, to reconstruct the genesis of the text; second, to make this evolution understandable, processable and visible; and third, with the text as a witness to display the development of urban law and urban life in the Late Middle Ages.

This article:

outlines the challenge of editing a multi-layered medieval manuscript;

discusses why this leads to a new understanding of a critical edition of such a text; and

introduces the techniques used to create the electronic edition of kundige bok, in particular highlighting the linkage between the two dimensions of ‘text’and ‘time’ based on the TEI P5 scheme.

The making of TEI P5

Wittern, C., Ciula, A., Tuohy, C. — 2009-05-29

The TEI Consortium has taken on the task of maintaining the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. This article describes how the latest major revision to these Guidelines was developed over the course of >6 years by the members of the TEI Technical Council and workgroups charged and overseen by the Council and gives background information and reasoning for the decisions taken. Among the new additions for P5, two of the most outstanding, the chapters on Names, Dates, People, and Places and on digital facsimiles are treated in some more detail. The article concludes with a brief account of the decisions made with respect to customization and conformance.

Towards a TEI-based encoding scheme for the annotation of parallel texts

Boot, P. — 2009-05-18

Translation, adaptation, and other forms of appropriation of literary works can result in bodies of parallel texts. For the purpose of studying appropriation strategies, it is important to be able to annotate digital representations of these parallel text structures. This article uses early modern emblem culture (books of engravings or woodcuts, accompanied by mottos and explanatory texts) to investigate the forms this text parallelism may take. It defines requirements for annotation definition and proposes a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) extension to implement these requirements. In the proposed encoding scheme, TEI feature structures will be used for storing annotation information. This scheme should be useful for annotating parallel text structures as well as for other annotation tasks. The annotation scheme assumes the annotated texts are available in XML. If this is not the case (there is no electronic version of the text at all or perhaps only a facsimile) the article suggests the definition of a TEI proxy document. A TEI proxy document contains enough of the structural aspects of the texts to serve as a basis for attaching annotations to the text. Outside of the annotation context, proxy documents may serve as a basis for adding functionality to image-based editions.

The TEIViewer: Facilitating the transition from XML to web display

Schlitz, S. A., Bodine, G. S. — 2009-05-14

This article addresses the need for TEI display tools. In order to illustrate the need for display tools, we begin with a brief review of the tools that are currently available, summarizing in particular those listed on the TEI Wiki Tools page. We then turn to a discussion of our work on the development of the TEIViewer (http://teiviewer.org), a simple, JavaScript-driven, portable display tool designed to facilitate the online representation of and interaction with elements and attributes described within select modules of the TEI P5 Guidelines and encoded as layers of data and metadata in TEI-XML documents. We explain how the TEIViewer works by describing the interactions between the XML source layer, the display layer generated via XSL, and the interactive layer powered by jQuery and CSS; and we explain why we chose the jQuery JavaScript library to manage the Viewer's functionality as well as the advantages of this decision. Finally we describe current implementations and plans for release.

The digital edition of the Statuta comunis Vicentie of 1264

Siciliano, L., Salardi, V. — 2009-05-14

This article investigates the issues to be faced while producing a digital edition of a representative medieval text: Statuta Comunis Vicentie (1264). Statuta comunis are collections of civic rules very common in Northern Italy since the twelfth century. We are dealing specifically with the ones of Vicenza, a town near Venice. Statuta were usually organized in a single or multiple codices, including the collection of the civic rules, matched and allotted in big chapters (libri) according to the subject. Another fundamental characteristic is the constant review of the original text in different periods, generally due to changes in the government or in the organization of the city. Therefore, the most relevant matters to deal with are: first, description of metadata; second, structural analysis of the text; third, the markup of the additions and amendments; and fourth; identification of specific semantic values, in particular personal names, organizational names and names of places. This article outlines the reasons for choosing XML/TEI for the project, how to address the four matters listed above and how the chosen standard can be customized to treat the peculiar aspects of this text according to the traditional editing practice.

TEI documents in the grid

Zielinski, A., Pempe, W., Gietz, P., Haase, M., Funk, S., Simon, C. — 2009-05-14

This article describes the life cycle of a TEI Document within TextGrid, an eHumanities platform for scholarly text processing, in which structured search is based on the TEI framework and metadata with restricted values. A workbench is provided that offers tools for handling TEI documents, TextGridLab, making it easier to annotate, process, search, and persistently store new digitized texts. The digitization and annotation of the Campe dictionary¹ serves as a first test bed. The overall framework of TextGrid is very generic and can handle different types of text (literary editions, linguistic corpora, lexica) as well as heterogeneous data formats (plain text, XML/TEI, images). In fact, the TextGrid repository, TextGridRep, is designed as a digital virtual library over federated archives, where humanities projects are invited to participate. Sharing of data is enabled by means of a grid-based architecture. Specifically the middleware includes most of the treatment of authorization, search, and file management. TextGrid is entirely based on open source software including Eclipse² and Globus Toolkit.

TEI in a crystal ball

Jannidis, F. — 2009-05-14

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an organization, a research community, and a markup language. Looking back into the history of these three TEIs, this article tries to describe what has been achieved and what its future challenges will be. The historical analysis is based on a closer look at the development of the TEI-L and topics covered by the Guidelines. A final section outlines possible roles of the TEI as an infrastructure for digital libraries and disciplinary virtual environments.

Teaching TEI: The Need for TEI by Example

Terras, M., Van den Branden, R., Vanhoutte, E. — 2009-05-12

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)¹ has provided a complex and comprehensive system of provisions for scholarly text encoding. Although a major focus of the ‘digital humanities’ domain, and despite much teaching effort by the TEI community, there is a lack of teaching materials available, which would encourage the adoption of the TEI's recommendations and the widespread use of its text encoding guidelines in the wider academic community. This article describes the background, plans, and aims of the TEI by Example project, and why we believe it is a necessary addition to the materials currently provided by the TEI itself. The teaching materials currently available are not suited to the needs of self directed learners, and the development of stand alone, online tutorials in the TEI are an essential addition to the extant resources, in order to encourage and facilitate the uptake of TEI by both individuals and institutions.

Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the Posthuman. * William S. Haney.

Tripp, M. — 2009-04-16

Evaluating methods for computer-assisted stemmatology using artificial benchmark data sets

Roos, T., Heikkila, T. — 2009-03-14

Given a collection of imperfect copies of a textual document, the aim of stemmatology is to reconstruct the history of the text, indicating for each variant the source text from it was copied. We describe an experiment involving three artificial benchmark data sets to which a number of computer-assisted stemmatology methods were applied. Contrary to earlier similar experiments, we propose and use a numerical criterion to evaluate all the solutions. Moreover, our primary data set is significantly larger than used before. The results suggest the superiority of two computer-assisted methods amongst those tested: the maximum parsimony method implemented in the PAUP* software package and a related compression-based method we have proposed in earlier work.

Lexical Diversity in a Literary Genre: A Corpus Study of the Rgveda

Sotov, A. — 2009-01-12

This research¹ evaluates the extent to which lexical diversity, measured by frequent content words, hapax legomena, and type-token ratios (TTRs), is dependent on three features of the genre of the oral Indo-Aryan cultic poetry represented by the literary corpus of the Rgveda (ca. 165,000 tokens): characteristic choice of subject matter, usage of refrains, and the attribution of hymns to distinct poetic collectives. Analysis of 255 texts of 200 tokens showed that hymns on popular topics and where refrains were attested have a significantly higher rate of high-frequency content words and a lower ratio of once-occurring types. A higher TTR is observed in the hymns of specific family origin. Complexity of genre can be interpreted as a result of different discourse strategies of the poets. Overall, conservative mythological texts are characterized by regularity in word usage. Occurrence of content words, in the entire corpus, with lexemes denoting ‘deities’ on the one side and ‘nature’ on the other is accounted for by the factor of semantics, which deals with the structure of narrative.

A chronometric approach to Indian alchemical literature

Hellwig, O. — 2009-01-08

Indian alchemy, a branch of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), has produced a corpus of texts that are difficult to date using regular philological techniques. This article describes a contents-based computational method that is capable of calculating the relative chronology of these texts. Central parts of alchemical literature are encoded in a language model that can be understood by a computer and then compared with an alignment algorithm. Phylogenetic trees derived from these alignments show regularities in the ordering of alchemical texts, and these may be interpreted as temporal patterns. Processing these patterns with a minimization algorithm, we are able to compute a relative chronology of the corpus, which is largely consistent with results obtained using traditional philological techniques.

Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition

Hilpert, M., Gries, S. Th. — 2008-09-01

The use of corpora that are divided into temporally ordered stages is becoming increasingly wide-spread in historical corpus linguistics. This development is partly due to the fact that more and more resources of this kind are being developed. Since the assessment of frequency changes over multiple periods of time is a relatively recent practice, there are few agreed-upon standards of how such trends should be statistically interpreted. This article addresses the need for a basic analytical toolbox that is specifically tailored to the interpretation of frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora. We present a number of suggestions for the analysis of data that analysts commonly face in historical studies, but also in the study of language acquisition.