PeterRobinson

Review by Edward Vanhoutte. To be published in Variants: The Yearbook of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. Volume 1, 2002. Edited by Peter Robinson and H. T. M van Vliet; Reviews Editor Dirk Van Hulle. Brepols, Louvain. For the ESTS: see www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/ests. ’¡ÄBut the major contribution to the field of electronic editing, and of humanities computing in general, was made by the work of the Text Encoding Initiative (tei) which constituted a methodological shift in textual studies, and which is now maintained by the tei Consortium <http://www.tei-c.org>. With the publication of the green voluminous P3 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in 1994 (Chicago, Oxford: tei) scholarly editors were presented with recommendations for the ’¡ÈTranscription of Primary Sources’¡É (chapter 18) and the encoding of the ’¡ÈCritical Apparatus’¡É (chapter 19). A frequently heard critique of scholarly editors who work with modern material is that the guidelines are too focused on the production of transcriptions and editions of older material. A close look at the workgroups which created the document type definition subsets for these two chapters shows why that is: the majority of the members were scholars of older texts. Adapting these guidelines to the transcription and edition of modern material might, however, be a difficult exercise and might need some stretching of the guidelines, but it is by no means impossible. One of the basic principles which the Guidelines defend is that any scholar should have the freedom to express his or her own theory of the text by means of text encoding and markup. Therefore, the tei provides humanities scholars of any discipline, language or writing system with a very powerful extension mechanism which can accommodate the tei document type definitions (dtds) at will. A clever piece of software called ’¡ÈThe Pizza Chef’¡É even allows you to generate your customized tei dtds on-line. The work of the Text Encoding Initiative (tei) will no doubt prove to become of even more importance in the future, now that the tei Consortium has issued a completely revised and xml-compatible version of its Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (tei P4) (Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard 2002) in a fashionable blue and silver. The revision of the Guidelines has resulted in various changes when compared to tei P3. Apart from the typography, which has been changed with mixed success, the elements are now introduced with their respective attributes, which was not the case in P3. The frequently consulted alphabetical reference list of classes, entities and elements at the end of the second volume have been cleared from some systematic errors and omissions, and the editors have changed the format of this section substantially ’¡Èwe hope for the better’¡É (1059). It is still a question if this typographically revamping indeed presents the reference section in a better way. But then again, the on-line version of the guidelines which can be freely consulted on <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/> is an extremely useful and user friendly manual for those who do not mind reading on the screen. Further changes to the P3 version are documented in the prefatory notes at the back of the book and comprise the complete xml-ization of the tei fragments with backwards tei-sgml compatibility (tag omission is not allowed anymore), the validity check on all the examples scattered throughout the guidelines, and a new second chapter ’¡ÈA Gentle Introduction to xml.’¡É A new <ab> (anonymous block) element was introduced ’¡Èto contain any arbitrary component-level unit of text, acting as an anonymous container for phrase or inter level elements analogous to, but without the semantic baggage of, a paragraph.’¡É (719). To the textual critic who has worked with tei in creating electronic editions back in the sgml era, two questions remain with the publication of P4. Firstly, the riddle of the different content models of <add> and <del> (specialPara and phrase.seq respectively) has not been solved, and secondly, the tei community would be much helped by an xslt stylesheet for the transformation of normalized (capitalized) sgml legacy data to case sensitive tei xml. The tei Consortium has commissioned a working group to look into the problems of migrating legacy data from sgml to xml. It is much hoped that the work of the working group will enable projects to remain compatible with the upcoming P5 version of the tei.11 April 2003 13:18:26