Categorization of points in AI3 W5, literary studies WG 'final critique'

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, 24 May 1991

Good points:  23, 46

    23.  Explicit lists should be given of required and optional tags.
    46.  Cast list should also include date and location of first
performance.

True, though not surprising or new:  6, 22, 32

    6.  P. 4 alludes to macros and parsers but gives no examples.  If
they exist, examples should be listed here.
[this belongs in tutorial literature, not reference manual]
    22.  In cases where an older and more authoritative method of
identifying specific passages exists, as in the Bible, it should be used
in preference to page and line numbers from the source text.
[Biblical versification postdates printed page and line numbers by
some years]
    32.  Experts in text criticism should be consulted for the tags for
critical apparatus.
[they have been]

Questions with answers:  2, 3, 42, 43.

    2.  Question:  are multiple hierarchic structures (physical, formal,
grammatical, semantic, actantial, narrative, psychological, etc.) (a)
all definable as hierarchies in SGML, (b) taggable in the TEI scheme?
    3.  Can SGML handle richness of expression and multiple levels of
meaning?
    42.  What is the meaning of the 'unit=absent' attribute-value pair
for the MILESTONE tag?  What is there to mark if the text is not
present?
    43.  Section 7.1 uses the term 'narrative' in the sense 'prose'.

Misunderstandings and misreadings:  1, 7, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25,
27, 34, 35, 45, 47.

    1.  Guidelines need a theoretical introduction which defines 'text',
'tag', 'hierarchy', etc.
    7. Section 2.1.4 recommends embedding an interpretation of a text
into its DTD; this should be changed.
    11.  Explicit coding of text structure will be error-prone and hard
to verify.  Implicit coding by means of file format should be preferred.
    13.  Section 5.1 (p. 71) definition of 'text' is incorrect.  Not all
texts are extended and spoken discourse is not 'text' until written
down.
    17.  Line breaks should be mentioned as a possible constituent of
paragraphs in section 5.3.1
    20.  Section 7.3.1.1 requires (p. 177) the specification of the
METER attribute in every line; this should not be so.
    21.  The prescription for rendering rhyme pattern made in section
7.3.1.2 is too prescriptive and should be loosened.
    24.  Short tags should be explicitly recommended for local
processing, expanding on the recommendation to that effect in section
1.1.2.
    25.  Exclamation point, pound sign, and square brackets should be
allowed in interchange.  SGML should not take precedence over the needs
of scholars.
    27.  The tags for names and abbreviations (sections 5.3.6 and 5.3.7)
must be optional.
    34.  The bibliographic tagging in section 5.3.7 is too cumbersome,
especially for use in data capture.
    35.  Section 5.8.1 proposes a tag for sentence boundaries, which
assumes that sentence boundaries can be known.
    45.  Section 7.3.2.1 does not contribute to the problem of attaching
to each sentence or word of a play the identity of its speaker.
    47.  The confusion between '1' and '2' and 'Francisco' and
'Barnardo' is messy.


Errors:  4, 12, 16, 19, 22 (Biblical versification does not antedate
printing), 38, 41

    4.  Discussion of highlighting and font shifts pp. 78, 124 seems to
imply reliance on authorial intention; such a reliance ceased being
intellectually respectable about 1940.
    12.  Pagination and lineation frequently vary with the printing, not
just the edition, of a text; printer and date of printing should be
required in the TEI header.
    16.  In Pleiade editions, the colophon appears in the front matter.
[The 'colophon' tag should therefore be allowed in the front matter.]
    19.  Normal practice in literary study of prose texts is to refer to
page and line numbers.
    22.  In cases where an older and more authoritative method of
identifying specific passages exists, as in the Bible, it should be used
in preference to page and line numbers from the source text.
    38.  In the example from Richardson, the word 'Anglice' is marked as
Latin, but it is not found in Lewis and Short; is it really Latin?
    41.  The second example date in section 5.3.11 should end the tagged
date after 'seventy-seven', not after 'Eighty-Sixth', to be consistent
with the interpreted value.

Philosophical differences:  5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 24, 26, 33, 36, 40.

    5.  Literary work requires that electronic texts be stable and not
subject to change.
    8.  The guidelines should make explicit the distinction between
interpretive markup (e.g. tags for emphatic phrases and foreign words)
and non-interpretive markup (e.g. tags for font shifts).
    9.  Markup minimization should be explicitly encouraged.
    10.  Text structure should be made clear by format of the file, not
by explicit tags for text structure.
    14.  Line numbers are important methods of locating specific
passages of text and should be recommended for general use.
    15.  The word 'colophon' is not one everyone can be expected to
know.
    24.  Short tags should be explicitly recommended for local
processing, expanding on the recommendation to that effect in section
1.1.2.
    26.  Names of data entry personnel should be recorded in the TEI
header.
    33.  Direct quotation, indirect quotation, indirect discourse, free
indirect discourse, authorial comment, description, and narration cannot
reliably be distinguished from each other and should not be tagged.
    36.  Consistent use of presentational markup would avoid the
problems that arise when descriptive markup is not feasible for some
reason.
    40.  The use of tags like DIV0 and DIV1 will frighten literary
scholars.  Blank lines should be used instead.

Unclear in content or import:  28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 48.

    28.  List handling tags are too wordy and take too much for granted.
    29.  Section 5.4 applies only to post-input markup.
    30.  The example given for critical apparatus is trivial.
    31.  Lack of variants should not be recorded explicitly.
    37.  The example from Richardson's Clarissa in section 5.11.1 does
not identify the copy text or give page and line numbers.
    39.  In the Richardson example, it is unclear whether the italics
mark quotation, emphasis, or irony.
    48.  The DTD for drama is unusable.