A day in Lower Normandy

And so to Caen, whose University campus boasts magnificent if vaguely fascist architecture, at the top of a hill, commanding splendid views over the urban sprawl to the countryside beyond, and liberally decked with graffiti to bewilder future epigraphers

The University Press of Caen having joined forces with two other departments to offer him a visiting fellowship, my distinguished and white haired Danish colleague Matthew Driscoll is organising a series of seminars over the next few months, and I am here for the kick off session “TEI et encodage des sources”. About a dozen or so TEI fans are gathered in the Belvedere Room which is vast and very cold but still affords delightful prospects (as they say).

First up is Julia Rogers, a local doctorante describing the online edition of Descartes on which she is working under the watchful tutelage of Pierre-Yves Buard inter alia. No manuscript survives of Descartes’ works, and modern editors have played fairly fast and loose with them as a consequence: this impeccable electronic edition returns to the first printed editions as its basis, but uses all the possibilities of digital editing. Text is captured and maintained collaboratively by up to 15 scholarly editors, using a customisation of XML Mind to enforce a simple P5-conformant protocol designed by Pierre-Yves (and built with Roma), allowing for such niceties as the addition of editorial notes, citations, tracking of quotations, mathenmatical formulae (currently done in TeX though this will change) etc. Elsewhere in the University a fairly sophisticated morphologically-aware search engine is being developed, so that the original text can be queried in Modern French. The online edition will also integrate high quality page images supplied by the BNF, compensating for the decision not to encode all features of the layout. Impeccable, as I said. I was also impressed (as usual) by Sourcencyme,  presented by Isabelle Draelants from Nancy and Catherine Jacquemard from Caen. This ongoing project will combine a textual corpus of medieval encylopaedias (about seven so far) with a sophisticated indexing system tracing the chains of reference and citation amongst them, extending in some cases beyond into the 19th century. As a real hand-built hypertext, it is thus increasingly becoming the thing it represents: a complete encyclopaedia of medieval learning, endowed with tools for collaborative editing and annotation, and also with a specialist journal-like addition published by the ubiquitous revues.org. However, unless I misunderstand, a significant number of the texts it treats are owned by Brepols, which may pose access problems. Next before lunch, we were entertained by Vincent Olivet and Frederick Glorieux from the Ecole Nationale des Chartes whose home-grown RelaxNG tools continue to advance in the general direction of TEI conformance. They have been working on a direct conversion from ODT to TEI, using the same principles as Sebastian Rahtz’ stylesheets but aiming at a more specific homegrown RelaxNG schema, now expressed (I think) using an ODD. This was all very satisfactory, as is the fact that the tools in their workshop continue to be readily accessible.

Lunch (a three course affair involving some rather good salmon, and a chocolate mousse) was also highly satisfactory, and we reconvened much restored for an afternoon combining three short project presentations with set pieces from Matthew and from myself. Subhasree Pasupathy, from Caen, first of the three, described her use of the TEI mechanism to represent textual variation in her thesis on the projects of the Abbe de St Pierre. Thomas Lebarbe introduced us to the pleasingly heterodox digital Stendhal project at Grenoble during which I wondered not for the first time how hard could it be to write an ODD corresponding with their home grown DTD. Finally, Jorge Fins from Tours showed us how the Bibliotheque Virtuelle des Humanistes at Tours is now using both XTF and Philologic to search its corpus.

And so to the grand old man of TEI -based editing: not me, but Matthew Driscoll. He spoke in English but (as someone said to me afterwards) with such limpidity of discourse as to pose no problem (which sounds even better in French), Citing WS Greg’s distinction between “substantive” and “accidental” variation he showed how TEI markup enables one to capture both, but display either, by the judicious tweaking of rather cunning stylesheets developed by Eric Haswell. He also talked about gaiji, news of the existence and facilities of which does not seem to have penetrated everyone’s consciousness to the extent that it probably should have by now. And finally, a good half of the material I had prepared for my own talk having been presented by previous speakers, I was able to close the day in a suitably forward-looking way by focussing mainly on the new concepts proposed for handling l’edition genetique (sourceDoc, mod, change etc.) in TEI P5 which all seemed to go down quite well.

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