========================================================================= Date: Mon, 4 Mar 91 11:57:00 EDT Reply-To: Text Encoding Initiative public discussion list Sender: Text Encoding Initiative public discussion list From: John Lavagnino Subject: Comments on Critique by Literature Working Group I've been wondering at the lack of response on this list to the report released last month by the Literature Working Group. Here, at any rate, are my comments on the most important issues they suggest---which skip over the questions they raise about the content and audience of TEI P1, and about its relation to actual software, because my notes on those subjects would add nothing to what Michael Sperberg-McQueen says in his Valentine's Day progress report. 1) ``The Perspective of the Literature Scholar'' as seen by the Working Group The group's report rests on an assumption about what the encoding of literary texts is for, and how it's done, that doesn't reflect the breadth of actual practice. Section 1.B of their report talks about the ``pragmatics of work on literature texts'' and states their assumption: that the only reason you enter literary texts into a computer is to make mechanical analyses of large amounts of previously-edited text. This is one kind of work the TEI guidelines need to support. But it's not the only one, and other kinds of work have different needs, which aren't taken into consideration by the group when they make many of their absolute statements about what should and should not be. For example, they assert that descriptive markup is always preferable. Their argument sounds dubious to me even for the kind of work they're talking about; but it's entirely irrelevant for the editors of modernized texts, in which the encoding can indicate the meaning rather than the appearance with ease and certainty---because the editor who chooses to italicize a word is alive and present, ready to swear to a belief that it is a foreign word. This is not a trivial application. The number of modernized texts that is produced is far greater than the number of critical editions; and having them available in a standard electronic encoding would be of great value. But the Working Group's report assumes that this kind of work does not exist and is not of interest---a position it takes with respect to lots of other computer applications that literature scholars have thought up. In justification for this position, the report claims that the survey conducted by the Working Group revealed that everybody agrees with them in wanting a very minimal markup, and in opposing the general distribution of texts containing interpretive information: ``Literature scholars are not interested in, in fact many object vehemently to, the perspective of obtaining texts which already contain - explicitly or implicitly - literary interpretations. The responses and comments elicited by the Survey bear eloquent witness to this.'' This claim is false. The report released by the Working Group on their survey turned up, on the question of interpretive information, 15 people who considered it ``essential'' or ``important,'' and 20 who thought it ``should not be included.'' This does not justify the group's sweeping claim about what all literary scholars want. What that report instead shows is that some people think an encoding for interpretive information is a splendid idea---the Survey elicited eloquent comments to this effect---and that others hate the idea. The Working Group should sort out for us the reasons behind both positions, and suggest how to accommodate both groups of scholars. Instead, they've decided that one group of scholars just doesn't matter. 2) The Working Group's notion of the TEI's value The Working Group also seems pretty convinced that you'd never want to follow the TEI guidelines for anything except writing tapes to ship off to the Oxford Text Archive; that they're obviously not appropriate for ``local'' use. Their report asserts that the guidelines are only for ``interchange and possibly archival purposes''---``interchange'' here evidently meaning ``between distantly-separated people,'' and never just ``between programs on your computer,'' as TEI P1 1.1.3 suggests. The report tells us: ``SGML should not take precedence over the needs of scholars.'' I find this surprising: the Working Group never seems to have considered that SGML---or some encoding standard for use in literary programs---is itself a need of scholars. I always assumed that standardization would help to bring us better software for literary computing, because it would make it possible to get general tools for processing texts; right now you can only use the ones designed for the particular encoding you've chosen, or invented locally. The Working Group seems to think that it's better if we all use incompatible home-grown encoding (and hence use only software we've written locally), and translate to SGML only for communication with the outside world. (Of course, if it's only for such communication nobody's ever going to use it.) The only justifications they give for local encoding are archaic: it's easier to type; you can read it, whereas SGML encoding of any complexity is hard to read. These are not serious arguments against a scheme which is not intended for data entry and is not intended to serve as a visual representation of a text for people to read. I, at least, am sticking with SGML. John Lavagnino Department of English and American Literature Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254 USA Internet: lav@binah.cc.brandeis.edu Bitnet: lav@brandeis