Consistency is a good thing…

Now that I have all the available files in a form which is at least valid according to a TEI P5 schema, I can start fussing about the consistency of the markup they contain.

Let’s start with an easy one. Attribute names may be marked up using the element <att>, or using the element <ident>, or using the element <name>, or just flagged in the running text, by a preceding @ (I didn’t find any cases of a following =, though I suspect there are some). I really don’t care a lot which is used, but I do care that there should be just one rule to bind them, not four. So how do things stand at present?

There are 298 <att> elements, 212 <ident> elements, and 98 <name> elements. <name> is used both for personal names and for names of attributes, classes etc. A first step therefore is to turn all name[@type] elements into idents, and to simplify the values for type. A second step might be to look at all occurences of attribute names simply flagged with an @ sign. in wPressDox, the regex [[:space:]]@[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]+] matches 608 times; in legacyTEI files, only 18. Some careful regex matching might enable me to turn the @thing cases into <att>s in most cases. But hold on a second: if consistency is the goal it would be much easier to turn all <att>thing</att>s into @thing than the reverse. The question really is : is faithfulness to the original tagging goals completely unimportant? We have 16 cases of ident[@type=’attr’] and 47 of ident[@type=’attrName’] and 21 cases of ident[@type=’attr’] as well as 32 name[@type=’attr’], and indeed some random occasions where <code> (with no @type value) is used to delimit an attribute name. Making all of these consistently <att>seems to preserve the original encoder’s goals. Turning them all into @xxx however seems somewhat different.

There are also cases where the original tagging has tried hard to make distinctions we would probably no longer bother with: for example <mentioned> and <soCalled>. I leave these well alone.

Now a more tricky one.

There are 1817 <div> elements, 705 of them being @typed. 619 of those are type=’h2’, but this does not necessarily reflect their hierarchic position, merely that they were originally indicated by an h2 level heading in the WordPress file. Of the 83 typed divs which are not “h2”, the most frequent are h3 (45), followed by h1 (8). However, of the 45 h3 divs, only 20 have an h2 parent; the remaining 25 are contained by an untyped div. Other very rare values include “agendaItem” (3), appendix (4), and glossary (3).

It seemed like a good idea to check that <div> elements contain something other than a nested div and remove the redundant layer if not. The xpath //div[count(*) eq 1][div] finds 52 items , though this may be an artefact of my retagging script. Somewhat more problematic are <div>s which contain just a <head: in some cases, these are probably genuine: for example

<div><head> 12:30 – 13:30: Lunch</head></div>
<div type="h2"><head>Goodbye Peter and thank you! 😟❤️</head></div>

but absent supernatural powers, it’s in principle impossible to know how to interpret a sequence of headings in the wordpress files. For example, here’s a snippet from the 2020-10_30824 document:

The “Review…” lines are div/head s containing a link to another part of the document (this kind of transclusion happens nine times in all). Are they siblings or parents of the “SUNDAY… ” div/head s ? Is the “Proposal on ruby glosses” a child or a sibling of “SUNDAY, 25…” ? You tell me. I have mostly left them all as siblings for the moment.

Then there’s lists: there are 2456 <list>s, only 109 of them typed, @type values are “unordered” (33), “simple” (21), “ordered” (25) and “gloss” (30).

There are 45 untyped lists which contain one or more items containing a label; three of these contain lists with labels as a child of the list as well as labels as child of the list/item; mercifully all confined to one file (2009-12). The label tag is used ambiguously: sometimes it contains a person siglum; sometimes a subheading. On further investigation, the siglum usage occurs only in one file (tcm24) so I changed all these to rs. The 30 explicitly gloss lists are all in the TEI legacy files too.

Further down the slippery slope: there are plenty of minority interest tagging distinctions: I have turned a scattering of <quote>s into <q>s, and all <ptr> elements into <ref>s, but not yet checked that all the @targets actually go somewhere. I have retained 9 cases of <time> which might just as well be <date>s; and six cases of <foreign>; also 76 <lb/> elements standing in (mostly) for proper structural markup. I have retained and made valid the one document in which <sp> and <speaker> elements have been used, but not tried to add such markup to the couple of occasions where the minutes launch into dramatic mode.

But rather than continue to polish this pig’s head, I have spent today providing it with some infrastructure, and putting it all in an accessible repository at https://github.com/lb42/theCellar

I also spent far too much time providing a CETEICEAN front end to it, at https://lb42.github.io/theCellar/tcMins/index.html

Plenty more to do. Of course.



Citer ce billet
foxglove (2023, 5 mai). Consistency is a good thing… Foxglove. Consulté le 29 mars 2024, à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/otmx

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