Text Encoding Initiative Research Articles

Triggering A Renaissance in Historical Textual Studies in Turcology: Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the Initial Standardised Ottoman Mathematics Text

This article seeks to answer a critical question about the impact of digital transformation, which global technological and digital developments have made a necessity, on historical textual studies in Turcology. The article draws attention to the need for digital transformation in historical textual studies and the lack of literature on the use of TEI in Turcology. The research considers historical textual studies as an object of digital cultural heritage, digital humanities, and digital scholarship. It is evaluated through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. The aim is to establish a symbiotic relationship between historical textual studies and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and offer a new perspective on the latest digital environment for studying Turkish manuscripts and the future of this research. It also explains how manuscripts (especially in the Ottoman field) should be encoded at TEI to enable interdisciplinary cooperation in digital editions. A case study of an 18th-century Ottoman mathematical text was encoded in TEI, and the process is explained in detail for those working in Turcology and those who want to do text editions with this method. The article's results are shared with the reader by presenting a Github link. These results constitute a new source for the international literature on digital encoding of historical texts and set standards for digital text editions to be used in historical text studies in Turcology. In this way, it aims to trigger a renaissance promoting the use of TEI in historical textual studies and to take the first step towards its eventual transformation into a renewed field of research.

Contabilizar el comercio imperial: analysis of early double-entry accounting books with TEI/DEPCHA

Abstract This article discusses the encoding of double-entry accounting books from the 16th-century Spanish Empire and presents initial stage results from analyzing the encoded text, based on our case study. We selected the accounting books containing transactional data from 1558 to 1560. The encoding process followed the Text Encoding Initiative proposed by the Digital Edition Publishing Cooperatives for Historical Accounts (DEPCHA), with some additional attributes specific to the ontology of the double-entry books. The article explains the method of encoding and describes the unique characteristics of the ledger, such as the format of bookkeeping and the spatial arrangement of information. We adopted DEPCHA’s markup methodology to represent the accounting vocabulary and used the @ana attributes to invoke a domain ontology for bookkeeping structure of transactions. The results from the data analysis focus on three aspects: identification of person names, accounting terms, and checking the balance of payments. The study concludes by highlighting our contribution to expanding new semantic vocabularies within the DEPCHA’s Bookkeeping Ontology, namely “bk: Total” and “bk: SubTotal.” It illuminates the flexibility in name spelling and the preference for mundane vocabularies in the left column of the ledger, while emphasizing accuracy in numerical values and calculations in the right column. We propose further encoding and analysis of transactional records to enhance the understanding of historical double-entry commercial records.

V. I. ABAEV'S HISTORICAL-ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY: ISSUES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DIGITAL BILINGUAL EDITION

In this article, we discuss the conclusions of the project on digitizing and translating the Historical-Etymological dictionary of Ossetic by V.I. Abaev, which has been carried out by the authors since 2020. The entries of the original include information of several kinds: Russian translations of an Ossetic word, related examples, usage and etymological notes. The etymological notes are usually free-form texts with a large number of cited forms from other languages (cognates, loanword sources, etc.). We argue for maximal preservation and thorough encoding of this information when creating a digital database. The optimal format for such purposes is XML markup, more specifically its variant intended for annotating text documents, TEI (Text Encoding Initiative, https://tei-c.org/). For digitizing the dictionary, we created a modification of this markup language, a module for Oxygen XML Editor, and a set of CSS files that ensure maximum similarity between our layout and the original. The same combination of XML and CSS allows generating the print version of the dictionary using the Prince typesetting system (https://www. princexml.com/) without any additional processing. For ease of search and access, we suggest supplementing the XML sources with a relational database automatically created from the lexical entries. In our project, this database serves as the source for the online interface of the dictionary (https://ossetic.iranic.space), powered by the OnLex platform [Makarov et al. 2022]. Hence, the project combines the features of several database types, which fully corresponds to the multi-faceted character of the original dictionary. We hope that our experience can be used for other digital lexicographic projects.

Shaping the Smart Search Possible: An Inside Story of ETD Metadata

Metadata is very important in scientific literature. Metadata in electronic dissertations and dissertations (ETDs) requires a modular workflow based on a flexible architecture. Metadata methods must be simplified by adapting procedures for different document formats and structures. The structure of the dissertation document, including Fig.s, tables, footnotes, etc., requires greater attention to the identification and organization of metadata in the ETD for rich textual content. Reliable extraction of appropriate metadata elements, such as title, author, abstract, keywords, etc., is essential for future citation capabilities. Such mechanisms are crucial for evaluating processes and adjusting ETD metadata to facilitate architecture expansion. Most modern ETDs rely on the organization of quality text documents, ranging from raw PDF documents or semi-structured XML documents to uniform standard TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) documents. The present study discusses metadata creation and harvesting, various extraction methods and digital library search, metadata for MARC records in ETD, and access to ETD metadata in the context of the current scenario. It also highlights the tags adopted for the creation of the MARC records in JNU Central Library ETD System for simple-level learning

Označevanje korpusov

Ordered collections of machine-readable texts, corpora, are useful in various branches of linguistics. The present paper focuses on the machine-readable form of corpora, above all on their annotation, i.e. adding interpretative information to the text in the corpus. The annotation presented is based on taking into consideration the international standards from this field, which contributes to better documentation and verifiability, easier use of processing applications, and better interchange and longevity. In the first part, corpus encoding standards, above all XML (eXtended Markup Language) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), are discussed, while in the second part some of the more interesting levels of linguistic annotation of corpora are outlined.

Ekdotika in tehnologija: elektronske znanstvenokritične izdaje slovenskega slovstva

The collection of critical editions eZISS came about with the connection of three elements: the awakening of interest in primary sources of Slovene literature; the intensive methodological introduction of the fundamental philosophical-historical sciences, particularly ecdotics or text criticism; and finally the use of contemporary open standards for electronic text encoding and processing. The article presents the points of departure and methods used in the preparation of scientific publications, in particular those methods employing electronic text encoding technology. The preparation of the publications is based on guidelines issued by the consortium Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), by which technological standards are linked with the classical philological methods of critical editions. This approach has also proved fruitful for the issuing of critical editions of Slovene literature, and it has stimulated more intensive interest in the research and publication of primary sources of Slovene literature.

ATOP

The TEI XSL Stylesheets codebase is a tool that tackles the transformation of TEI XML documents to and from various formats. This includes the crucial activity of generating schemas from TEI ODD, the TEI XML–conformant specification format that allows one to write a schema language (for example, TEI P5 itself is written in ODD) or to customize TEI P5 using a literate programming approach. Because of the difficulties of maintaining this current set of stylesheets, a task force was created with the mission of developing, from scratch, an ODD processor that reads in a series of one or more TEI ODD customization files, merges them with a TEI language (likely, but not necessarily, TEI P5 itself), and generates RELAX NG and Schematron schemas. This paper presents a rationale for this task and the initial steps of this work.

Back to Analog. Printing Digital Editions for Data Quality.

This article discusses the challenges of printing TEI XML data sets, and highlights a useful diagnostic value of PDF export for data quality. PDF output, indeed, renders only a part of the encoded information, but it can expose problems pertaining to the semantic accuracy and consistency, syntactic compliance, and completeness of the data. The uncovered problems are presented as possessing three dimensions: internal (the compliance of XML code with data models and schemata), external (the consistency of the print output in rendering the original), and contextual (arising from the interaction of XML with the transformation scenarios). These dimensions help to provide the definition of an error in the context of scholarly digital editions—both retro-digitized and originally digital. The article examines the extended skill set required of quality assurance specialists in social sciences and humanities (SSH) as compared to their industrial counterparts. It also places PDF production within the Agile testing framework, which aims to capture and eliminate defects in the early stages of product development.

Using Bayesian phylogenetics to infer manuscript transmission history

Abstract Bayesian phylogenetic methods offer various models that would be especially suitable in the reconstruction of textual traditions, but text-critical applications of phylogenetics to date have generally not taken advantage of these features. In this article, we offer a way forward for text-critical phylogenetics. On the side of theory, we highlight multiple Bayesian phylogenetic models and discuss their relevance to textual criticism. More practically, we show how TEI XML collations of textual traditions can be encoded to facilitate robust analyses using these models in BEAST 2, with the teiphy Python package mediating the conversion from TEI XML to BEAST XML. Finally, we give a proof of concept for this approach, showing that the results of BEAST 2 analyses of a sample collation of the Epistle to the Ephesians under different clock models cohere with established findings on the textual tradition of this work.

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")

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.

Progress with Repository-based Annotation Infrastructure for Biodiversity Applications

Progress with Repository-based Annotation Infrastructure for Biodiversity Applications

DirKorp

In this paper, we present recent developments on a new version (v3.0) of DirKorp (Korpus direktivnih govornih činova hrvatskoga jezika), the first Croatian corpus of directive speech acts developed for the purposes of pragmatic research. The corpus contains 800 elicited speech acts collected via an online questionnaire with role-playing tasks, a method of simulated communication that is implemented under pre-set conditions. This method is suitable for researching speech acts due to the ability to collect a great number of examples of such acts of equal propositional content and illocutionary purpose used in the same controlled situations. The presented situations are classified into two categories with regard to the relationship between the participants of the communication act: (1) situations involving interlocutors who are not in a familiar relationship; (2) situations involving interlocutors in a familiar relationship. Assignments of the two categories are organized into four pairs, asking respondents to share a speech act of similar propositional content. The respondents were 100 Croatian speakers, all undergraduate (63%) or graduate students (37%) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb). The corpus has been manually annotated on the speech act level, each speech act containing up to 14 features: (1) respondent ID, (2) familiarity/unfamiliarity, (3) utterance type, (4) directive performative verb in 1st person, (5) illocutionary force, (6) propositional content, (7) T/V form, (8) exhortative, (9) lexical marker of request, (10) lexical marker of apology, (11) lexical marker of gratitude, (12) honorific title, (13) grammatical mood, and (14) modal verb in 2nd person. It contains 12,676 tokens and 1,692 types. The corpus is encoded according to the TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, developed and maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). DirKorp is available for download under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license from GitHub in TEI format. We describe applied pragmatic annotation as well as the structure of the corpus.

The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun: morpho-phonological parsing and the history of a Native American language

The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (chm), which I present here, is a lemmatised, part-of-speech and grapho-phonologically parsed collection of texts in the ancestral language of the Mapuche people. This paper gives an overview of the corpus materials (spanning 1606 to 1930), their processing and search capabilities. The tei xml tags at the word and morpheme levels are shown to be suitable to account for the abundant agglutinative morphology of the language. The advantages of visualising sound–spelling equivalences across the various spelling systems in the corpus are also emphasised. Some uses and limitations of the corpus are surveyed too, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of typologically diverse languages to understanding language change and the importance of making heritage materials available to native speaker communities for revitalisation purposes.

Către o ediție digitală a operei lui Mihai Eminescu: alinierea in TEI-xml a versiunilor Doinei și vizualizarea cu Versioning Machine

The present study aims to outline a conceptual framework with a view to the scholarly digital publishing of Eminescu’s literary works. In the first part, we analyze the arguments formulated by Petru Creția in Testamentul unui eminescolog and introduce three methodological principles that could serve for a new division of the material, the integration of technical solutions and the design of interface functions. In the second part, we present the arguments for dividing the early texts into two categories, corresponding to the two major sequences of Eminescu’s biography: a first phase, between 1866 and 1883, encompassing full creativity, and a second phase, covering the period 18831889, from the onset of his illness until his death. Then, we highlight the symbolic importance of the last poem published before his breakdown. Indeed, Doina is an emblematic text for Eminescu’s creativity, but it has generally been occulted by the exegesis for ideological reasons. The third part of this article is devoted to a case study: aligning the verses of Doina in TEI xml, highlighting the technical problems resulting from the collation of several sources (Perpessicius edition, facsimile) and illustrating the problems of transcription.

Representing the Sung Poetry of Ottoman Art Music in a Critical Digital Edition in TEI XML

The research project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae” dedicates itself to the critical editions of Near Eastern music manuscripts that saw increasing production from the early 19th century onwards to record music especially centered in Ottoman Istanbul. The principal way to write down this originally oral tradition was in Hampartsum notation, invented around 1812 by an Armenian of the same name before it became discontinued with the introduction of Western staff notation from 1830 onwards. Within the project’s scope, there are three areas of research and deliverables: the indexing of sources in a catalog, the music edition under consideration of modal and rhythmic principles of Ottoman music, and the text edition of sung poetry mainly in Ottoman Turkish written in various scripts. Overarching are the digital humanities to present the research output in a holistic approach. This paper will focus on the design of representing the text edition in TEI XML format.

Distributed Text Services (DTS): A Community-Built API to Publish and Consume Text Collections as Linked Data

This paper presents the Distributed Text Service (DTS) API Specification, a community-built effort to facilitate the publication and consumption of texts and their structures as Linked Data. DTS was designed to be as generic as possible, providing simple operations for navigating collections, navigating within a text, and retrieving textual content. While the DTS API uses JSON-LD as the serialization format for non-textual data (e.g., descriptive metadata), TEI XML was chosen as the minimum required format for textual data served by the API in order to guarantee the interoperability of data published by DTS-compliant repositories. This paper describes the DTS API specifications by means of real-world examples, discusses the key design choices that were made, and concludes by providing a list of existing repositories and libraries that support DTS.

Modern Wendat Lexicography: Using XML to Reflect the Grammar and Lexicon of an Iroquoian Language

ABSTRACT: Building dictionaries with tools and methods emerging from Eurocentric traditions has proved problematic for Indigenous languages. We are building a dictionary for Wendat, an Iroquoian language formerly known as Huron that is being reawakened in Wendake, Québec. There are twelve manuscript dictionaries and lexicons for Wendat, created by missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are encoding the manuscripts using a standard Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema. However, when we came to create and encode a modern reconstructed Wendat dictionary, we were overly constrained by Eurocentric structures and assumptions inherent to TEI. Building our own custom XML schema allows us to better reflect Wendat grammar, responding to community needs and our evolving understandings of the language. This article describes the development of this schema, based on analysis of the archival documentation and related languages. Through this discussion, we will exemplify the schema we built and address the points of friction between TEI and Wendat grammatical structures. Our custom schema enables us to elegantly and economically represent exactly what our analysis of the language reveals, capturing elements of the language such as event-verb consequentiality, conjugation class, and stems, while avoiding incompatible elements and assumptions.

Teiphy: A Python Package for Converting TEI XML Collations to NEXUS and Other Formats

teiphy: A Python Package for Converting TEI XML Collations to NEXUS and Other Formats

Development of a Normalized Hadith Narrator Encyclopedia with TEI

The investigation in the narrator list of prophetic tradition (hadith) is considered an important task for different hadith sciences such as the biography of narrators. In fact, the authenticity of hadith is intensely related to the chain of narrators how transmitted the story. In addition, this science is interested essentially in analyzing the hadith narrator profile. Indeed, having a standardized encyclopedia of hadith narrators can help researchers to explore and manipulate the various hadith documents and can simplify different analyzes. For this reason, we aim to develop a standardized hadith narrator encyclopedia with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) language. To achieve this, we propose a TEI model for the hadith narrator properties. To experiment our TEI model, firstly, we construct a corpus of articles about hadith narrators from Wikipedia. Secondly, we use a system allowing the named entity recognition in relation with narrator data. Thirdly, we perform a post-processing to complete the corpus TEI annotation. Fourthly, we generate the hadith narrator encyclopedia based on our TEI model. The obtained result is encouraging despite some problems related to exceptional cases.

Digital Philological Practices: the Project “Chekhov Digital”

The article examines the role of “digital practices” in the formation of interdisciplinary humanitarian knowledge, the peculiarities of the development of digital humanitarian projects in the field of philology. The model of development of a digital project in the field of preparation of semantic markup of literary publications “Chekhov Digital”, which is a digital publication of the academic Сomplete works and letters of A. Chekhov, is considered. The goal of the project is to develop machine-readable (semantic) markup of the writer’s texts based on the standards of digital publication Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Within the framework of the project, standards for the preparation of digital Russian-language publications are being clarified, conceptual and technical conditions for implementation are being formulated, and infrastructure and new research methods are being developed. The structure of machine-readable annotation of documents has been developed, which enables marking up semantic entities in Chekhov’s texts, notes and comments for building semantic search within the corpus of the writer’s texts. To clarify the markup of semantic entities in the works of A. Chekhov the methods of automatic text processing were used, including topic modeling and vector semantic models to analyze the most important author’s concepts in the texts; corpus methods for studying the contexts of the use of verbal representations of concepts. The conceptual analysis made it possible to reconstruct the author’s concepts in the context of the markup of semantic entities. To mark up the names of real people and objects, a special database, based on pointers to letters, has been created. The project implements the principle of Open data, one of the goals of which is to create scientific communities around data. The work on the project has led to the development of scientific cooperation between the Centers for Digital Humanities of the HSE and the SFedU.