Steven J. DeRose

Markup systems and the future of scholarly text processing

Markup practices can affect the move toward systems that support scholars in the process of thinking and writing. Whereas procedural and presentational markup systems retard that movement, descriptive markup systems accelerate the pace by simplifying mechanical tasks and allowing the authors to focus their attention on the content.

What is text, really?

THE WAY IN WHICH TEXT IS represented on a computer affects the kinds of uses to which it can be put by its creator and by subsequent users. The electronic document model currently in use is impoverished and restrictive. The authors argue that text is best represented as an ordered hierarchy of content object (OHCO), because that is what text really is. This model conforms with emerging standards such as SGML and contains within it advantages for the writer, publisher, and researcher. The authors then describe how the hierarchical model can allow future use and reuse of the document as a database, hypertext, or network.

XML linking

The Web Consortiums XML Linking working group is developing specifications to enable more advanced hypertext functionality on the Web: in particular fine-grained anchors, external annotation, and bidirectional links. This paper examines basic goals and approaches; describes HTML linking limitations XML Linking seeks to overcome; and surveys the Working Groups primary specifications: XPath, XPointer, and XLink. As of this writing, the last two, while well advanced, are not final recommendations, and so are subject to change. Consult the W3C Web site for the latest versions.

XML and the TEI

Electronic texts are claimed to exhibit features distinct from their more tangible cousins. The Snapshot project aims to observe and capture language usage in an electronic medium by creating an open corpus of World Wide Web documents. These documents are re-encoded using the TEI guidelines to create a flexible, persistent and portable data repository. This report gives an overview of the decisions made with respect to the re-encoding of HTML documents, and with the structuring the overall corpus.

Further context for “What is text, really?”

The respondents all note the early publication date of 1990, but in fact the artide grew out of a series of presentations we gave in 1986 and 1987. There had been a steady evolution of mainframe text processing systems from pure formatting languages (such as Script and nroff) to more structured text-representation languages such as Waterloo GML, Scribe, and LaTeX. We considered SGMLs approval as a standard in 1986 as the codification of these advances and as a way their benefits could become widely available. At the same time, we saw the headlong rush to WYSIWYG formatting systems like MacWrite and the early versions of Microsoft Word. While these systems had vasdy superior user.interaction facilities, they utterly lacked support for any form of text sLucture.

FRESS hypertext system (abstract)

The FRESS poetry project was a pioneering use of hypertext in teaching in the humanities. All course readings were kept online in FRESS files that were accessible to the entire class. Student essays were handed by being linked to the material to be read. The instructor’s comments on the students’ work were also attached via links. The issues of file sharing for the class were simply addressed since there was only one graphics terminal capable of running the full FRESS interface. Thus all students had to go to specially scheduled lab times in order to do their readings and complete their assignments.

The HyTime Query Language

HyQ, the HyTime query language, provides the answer to situations where you need to specify hyperlinks to locations that may change over time or where a compact notation is preferable to a long location ladder. HyQ queries are similar to database queries, except that they have special facilities for dealing effectively with hierarchical structures like SGML documents, something that is not practical in the relational database model

The Structure of HyTime

This chapter provides an overview of the organization of HyTime and the conventions used to describe and define it. It explores the notion of “architectural forms” used in the definition of HyTime and SGML issues related to using HyTime productively. It also explains the HyTime model of hyperdocument and the major pieces of a complete HyTime software system and how they fit together. Finally, it describes HyTime’s method of declaring that an SGML document is a HyTime document and which optional features are used in a document

Advanced Measurement and Scheduling

This chapter introduces three separate but closely related topics for handling multimedia: the advanced portions of the HyTime Measurement module (clause 7), for representing units and measurements, the Scheduling module (clause 10), for representing the temporal and spatial relations of data in multimedia presentations, and the Rendition module (clause 11) for representing processes that affect the presentation of data

HyTime Quick Start

This chapter introduces the basic concepts and structures of HyTime through a series of examples. The examples do not include all the required declarations and setup, but working through them will give you a feeling for how HyTime approaches hypertext/hypermedia linking, and what constructs and terminology you should keep in mind throughout the following chapters