The Chekhov Digital project: tasks and problems of implementing semantic markup of texts (on the example of A. P. Chekhov's story "The Death of an Official")

Abstract

The article considers a model of preparation of machine-readable (semantic) markup of texts for the Chekhov Digital project on the example of philological interpretation of individual significant elements of A. P. Chekhov's story "Death of an Official" and presentation of this information explicitly based on the standards of digital publication Text Encoding Initiative (TEI/XML). Based on the work of literary researchers, significant entities have been identified for marking up the corpus of the writer's texts, but the question of their representation in the text remains quite complex. A philological examination of such aspects as "properties, states and events; character features" in an excerpt from the story of A.P. Chekhov was carried out from the point of view of the TEI markup capabilities for preserving philological knowledge in a machine-readable format. One of the objectives of the Chekhov Digital project is to go beyond a simple digitized text and provide useful digital tools for the researcher. The elements of machine-readable markup are presented, which make it possible to mark up significant entities in Chekhov's texts for organizing semantic search through the corpus of the writer's texts, the problems and research tasks arising in the process of implementing such interdisciplinary projects due to the need to combine the efforts of specialists from different fields of knowledge are considered. The project implements the principle of Open research data, the most important task of which is to create scientific communities around data. The work on the project led to the development of scientific cooperation between researchers of the Higher School of Economics, the UNC RAS and the SFU.