Martin Holmes

Encoding models for scholarly literature

In this chapter, the authors examine the issue of digital formats for document encoding, archiving and publishing, through the specific example of “born-digital” scholarly journal articles. This small area of electronic publishing represents a microcosm of the state of the art, and provides a good basis for this discussion. The authors will begin by looking at the traditional workflow of journal editing and publication, and how these practices have made the transition into the online domain. They will examine the range of different file formats in which electronic articles are currently stored and published. They will argue strongly that, despite the prevalence of binary and proprietary formats such as PDF and MS Word, XML is a far superior encoding choice for journal articles. Next, the authors look at the range of XML document structures (DTDs, Schemas) which are in common use for encoding journal articles, and consider some of their strengths and weaknesses. The authors will suggest that, despite the existence of specialized schemas intended specifically for journal articles (such as NLM), and more broadly-used publication-oriented schemas such as DocBook, there are strong arguments in favour of developing a subset or customization of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema for the purpose of journal-article encoding; TEI is already in use in a number of journal publication projects, and the scale and precision of the TEI tagset makes it particularly appropriate for encoding scholarly articles. They will outline the document structure of a TEI-encoded journal article, and look in detail at suggested markup patterns for specific features of journal articles. Next, they will look briefly at how XML-based publication systems work, and what advantages they bring over electronic publication methods based on other digital formats. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-834-6.ch005

Whatever happened to interchange

The adoption of XML and encoding standards such as those developed by the Text Encoding Initiative was accompanied by expectations of easy interoperability which are now widely seen as unfulfilled. The related but distinct concept of ‘interchange’ has received much less attention. This article argues that, particularly for sophisticated digital edition projects using XML, interchange is a more practical goal, and that approached in a specific way, it is highly beneficial not only to potential end users of the project’s data but also to the project itself.

Bridging the Gap Between a Simple Set of Structured Documents and a Functional Digital Library

Digital Libraries are complex systems that take a long time to create and tailor to specific requirements [1]. Their implementation requires specialized computer skills, which are not usually found within humanities text encoding projects. Many encoders working on text encoding projects find they cannot take their work to the next level by transforming their collections of structured XML [2] texts into a publishable web searchable and browsable service. Most often these teams find the way to encode their texts with a high degree of sophistication, but unless they have funds to hire computer programmers their collections remain on local disk storage away from public access. \({\bf\it }\)is a novel tool designed with the aim of bridging the gap between simply having a collection of structured documents and having a functional digital library for public access via the web. The goal of this project is to build the tools to manage an extensible, modular and configurable XML-based repository which will house, search/browse on, and display documents encoded in TEI-Lite [3] on the World Wide Web. \({\bf\it }\)provides an administrative interface that allows DL administrators to upload and delete documents from a web accessible repository, analyze XML documents to determine elements for searching/browsing, refine ontology development, decide on inter and intra document links, partition the repository into collections, create backups of the entire repository, generate search/browse and display pages for users of the website, change the look of the interface, and associate XSL transformation scripts and CSS stylesheets to obtain different target outputs (HTML [4], PDF, etc.).