Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

1. 

   Ryan Cordell
   Member

   Hi all,

   So I'm tinkering with the TEI in my first batch of "Celestial Railroad" editions (http://celestialrailroad.org/), and I'm looking for the best way to indicate, in the metadata, a few features of each text. I want to be able to indicate the denomination and/or political affiliations of each newspaper/magazine that reprinted the story. I thought I could add some fields in the <sourceDesc>: e.g. <sourceDenomination> or <sourcePolitics>, but that seems to raise red flags when I attempt to post or use the TEI file. Any suggestions for how I can encode this information? The religious and/or political backgrounds of the newspapers are central to the questions I'm asking about these texts.

   Thanks,
   Ryan

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   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
2. 

   Hugh Cayless
   Member

   It looks like TEI *almost* does what you want. If the <org> element could contain <faith> and <affiliation> I think it would do the trick. This is the kind of thing it might be worth filing a feature request for at http://tei.sourceforge.net/ and/or asking on the TEI list (http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=tei-l&A=1).

   -Hugh

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
3. 

   Patrick Murray-John
   

   Adding new elements to TEI, at least in a non-uncouth way, generally means extending the TEI itself http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/odds.xml . Of course, it is possible to do what you want and ignore the warnings about invalid markup, but then you still have the problem of teaching whatever tools you are using about the new elements.

   One way at it is to make liberal use of the @type attribute:

         <sourceDesc>
           <listPerson>
             <org>
               <name>Society of Silly Walkers</name>
               <note type="politics">silly</note>
               <note type="denomination">Pythonian</note>
             </org>
           </listPerson>
         </sourceDesc>

   You still have to teach whatever tools you're using for processing what to do with the type attribute, but that keeps things within TEI's framework, and so minimizes that effort.

   (TEI validation can sometimes be odd when you aren't including just a <p>, so it might take some experimentation to get rid of validation flags)

   HTH

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
4. 

   elotroalex
   Member

   I just wanted to add a comment in the form of a question with three answers: What do you want the TEI to do for you here? If the question is to write metadata in such a way that your work will be interoperable with other ventures out there, then new tags will work against you. If you are using it to organize the way users of your site can retrieve the data, then I think Patrick's solution works good enough. If you are really just using this for personal reference, a good ol' <note> does the trick.

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
5. 

   Ryan Cordell
   Member

   Thanks for the advice Hugh, Patrick, and Alex. The type attribute might work. To answer your question, Alex: right now I have a very specific interest in the organization of the site I'm creating. I want visitors to be able to sort witnesses by denominational or political affiliation. I'd like that information hard-encoded, however, because I have ambitions toward more and bigger projects working with 19th-Century periodicals. Political and religious affiliation are central bits of metadata when working with that corpus. I think I can fairly say that a majority of 19C periodicals were religious or political organs (or both), so any archive of periodical texts should account for those allegiances in its metadata.

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
6. 

   elotroalex
   Member

   So you're thinking future inter-operability. Then Patrick's advice to suggest it to the TEI folk is the best way to go here. Your work brings up an interesting issue about the organic growth of TEI. If scholars will keep finding categories that will be relevant for large bodies of material, will we ever stop adapting the TEI? It seems on the surface that the amount of categories that are generalizable and applicable to large archives are finite, but there is that nagging question in the back that shifting concerns in the disciplines will generate an unending number of new categories. If that is the case, then the task would be to figure out a way to incorporate those in the thinking of TEI so that those things can be handled at the attribute level.

   I'm sure, though, that these things have been part of the discussions for years now, so I guess all I'm saying is "we're still not there yet."

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
7. 

   Hugh Cayless
   Member

   Replying to @elotroalex's post:

   That was me :-). In any case, TEI clearly conceives of affiliation as being an attribute of persons, but it seems clear that organizations can have affiliations too (e.g. Sinn Féin was the political arm of the IRA). My approach would be to ask whether allowing <affiliation> as a member of <org>, and perhaps making it @type-d as well would be reasonable. Then you could have <affiliation type="political"> and <affiliation type="religious">, etc. as attributes (in the non-XML sense) of an <org>.

   I shouldn't go look at these things, because I only find stuff that makes me sad. I think, actually, that elements like <affiliation> should be special cases of <relation>. The latter annoys me because it almost lets you encode RDF-like triples, and is horribly clunky.

   TEI is nowhere near "done". It's just starting to get interesting.

   H

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink
8. 

   mudshark
   Member

   In the source description mostly you just describe the source/s from which your TEI document is transcribed, using fairly conventional bibliographic fields like author, title, publication date etc. Few bibliographies would characterise whole journals as "left wing" or "rosicrucian" or whatever terms your desired taxonomy would contain. If you're trying to characterise the document in that sort of way , have you considered using one of the children of <textClass> like <catRef> or <keywords>?

   "suggest it to the TEI folk" is definitely a good suggestion (that's what the TEI-L list is for)... as long as you remember that we're all TEI folk! The standard develops and evolves organically responding to the changing requirements of its community. I don't expect those requirements to ever stop changing, any more than I expect humanities scholarship to find the One True Answer and go home.

   Posted 4 years ago Permalink

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