20150504 introduction2 digitalepigraphy-visible-words_final

Introduction to digital epigraphyEmmanuelle Morlock

CNRS, HISoMA (UMR 5189)

French-american program ‘Visible Words’Information day, Ecole Française d’Athènes, may 4th, 2015

Outline

● Digital Scholarly Editions (DSE)

● Digital epigraphy examples

● How does it work?

What is a DSE*?*Digital Scholarly Edition

Why digital editions?

1. to facilitate the pooling and exchange of resources 2. for larger dissemination of resources:

○ as webpages○ multimodal distribution : one single source (xml) => several outputs

(html, pdf, word, epub, xml, etc.)

3. to overcome the material constraints and limits of print editions

4. to enable new kinds of exploitations (statistics, visualizations, semantic web, big data…)

Text?

Patrick Sahle

A critical representation

● Representation:○ re-creation, re-presentation of a text○ model, data structure(s)

● Critical:○ enhancement of the material with scholarly knowledge:

■ facsimile != not a digital scholarly edition

● A schoarly edition is about a research question...○ Research objectives determines what is necessary to annotate

cf. P. Sahle, Criteria for Reviewing Scholarly Digital Editions, version 1.1<http://ride.i-d-e.de/reviewers/catalogue-criteria-for-reviewing-scholarly-digital-editions/>

“model” of brandebourg gate with lego blocks

Digital epigraphy?

Digital Epigraphy: community driven from the beginning

● Since 1999-2000 ○ 1st draft of EpiDoc as guidelines for the application of TEI

● Today:○ a mechanism for the creation of complete digital editions○ a framework maintained by an active community

“The collaborators were seeking a digital encoding method that preserved the time-tested combination of flexibility and rigor in editorial expression to which classical epigraphers were accustomed in print, while bringing to both the creator and the reader of epigraphic editions the power and reusability of XML.”

a TEI file structure

Digital Epigraphy: What is EpiDoc?

● EpiDoc○ a subset of TEI tags○ specific structural constraints:

■ re-expression of the epigraphic lemma in the metadata of the transcription file (teiHeader)

■ transcription part (text) divided in the conventional parts of a traditionnal edition: edition, apparatus, bibliography, commentary, translation

○ guidelines for their use, dedicated to epigraphy○ tools (xslt tranformation files from XML to .html and .txt, ODD schema)

div[@type=”commentary”]

entrée d’apparat critique

leçon préférée

alternative

version régularisée

version diplomatique

autre leçon

fin entrée d’apparat critique

What new interfaceswill you design?

inscriptions as ‘communication devices’...

How does it work?very basic principle of web pages production

the formula

HTML + CSS=

web pagein a navigator

<html>

(...)

<h1>Visible Words</h1><p>Editer & Etudier les inscriptions dans un environnement numérique : méthodes, outils, ressources</p>

(...)</html>

body {

font-family:Times;

}

h1 {

font-size: 200%;

color: green;

font-weight: bold;

}

p {

color: black;

font-size: 100%;

margin-top:10%;

}

Visible WordsEditer & Etudier les inscriptions dans un environnement numérique : méthodes, outils, ressources

h1(title level 1)

How do you do it?

XML file HTML filetransformation (XSLT, Xquery)

Indextransformation (XSLT, Xquery)

manyXMLfiles

TOC

RDF

etc.

edition as the design of

information artifacts

Why XML?the basics

XML in short

1. XML doesn’t do nothing. It only describes. With means of tags (delimiter). In a context of text representation: text structures in particular (book, section, chapter, paragraph, etc.).

2. XML tags are not pre-defined.One can freely create its own tags (according to one’s research interests, for example).

3. But a tag’s grammar can be defined (DTD or Schema)Provides some rigour or means to use a common language between projects.

4. XML is defined to be self descriptive and can easily be readYou can open any xml file with any text editor and read the tags labels (it’s english!)

Descriptive markup - 1

★ chunks of text (of all sizes) delimited by start tag and end tag

★ description of nature of function in tag name

<tagX>My contenttagX>start tag

end tagchunk of text


★ Attributes: additional information

<handNote xml:id="EP" medium="red-ink">

Ezra Pound's annotations.

</handNote>

valueattribute

name


★ descriptive markup says what things are.○ not what is to be done with the data (procedural information)○ not how they are to be displayed (presentational information). ○ The objective is to describe the fonction and not the final appearance.

★ Separation of form and content

★ Compare:

★ More flexibility:○ same underlying data for multiple presentations○ presentation easy to change through stylesheets, etc.○ facilitates the addition of multiple annotation and re-use

<author>Louise Labé</author><span class=”small-caps”>Louise Labé</span>

More specifically

XML file :<author><forename>Louise</forename> <surname>Labé</surname></author>

CSS file:surname { font-variant: small-caps; font-family:Times; }

Web page in browser:

Louise LABÉ

Advangages of a TEI/Epidoc markup

ExpressivenessExploitabilityUpgradability

Reusability

EpiDoc encoding example: abbreviation <expan>

<abbr>a</abbr><ex>bc</ex>

</expan>

<expan><abbr>

<supplied reason="lost" cert="low">F</supplied>el</abbr><ex cert="low">icitati</ex>

</expan>

a(bc)

Default (Panciera) style: [F?]el(icitati?)Duke Databank style: [F(?)]el(icitati(?))London style: [F?]el(icitati?)

Tools: Oxygen Editor

Schema & documentation

Wrap up - 1

● Digitized vs digital ○ if you can reproduce your edition without substantial loss, you’re not really doing a scholarly

edition…

● Encoding text allows to:○ publish texts electronically

○ capture semantic distinctions

○ single input => multiple output

○ interchange with other projects

■ federated searches

■ linked data

○ Reuses

○ Long term sustainability

Wrap up - 2

● Markup may be an intellectual activity: ○ there is no such thing as a neutral markup ○ the editor’s job: deciding what markup to apply and how this represents his understanding

● It’s not difficult: Philology is encoding

20150504 introduction2 digitalepigraphy-visible-words_final

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