teiJournal

I've begun adding more blocks to the ODD file used to generate the schema, to restrict the range of values available for specific attributes. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out exactly how to do this; the only really useful documentation I was able to find was this, but even then I had to hack around at the values of the @mode attribute (they have to be "change" on the <elementSpec> tag and "replace" on the <attDef> tag, for some reason). This is what I have so far (both blocks are simplifications, as a proof of concept):

<elementSpec module="core" mode="change" ident="hi">
    <attList>
        <attDef ident="rend" mode="replace" usage="req">
            <valList type="closed">
                <valItem ident="bold">
                    <gloss>Rendered in bold.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="italic">
                    <gloss>Rendered in italics</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="strikethrough">
                    <gloss>Rendered with a horizontal line through the middle of the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="underline">
                    <gloss>Rendered with a line below the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="foreign">
                    <gloss>Rendered in a distinct manner to highlight the fact that this word is not in the main language of the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
            </valList>
        </attDef>
    </attList>
</elementSpec>

<elementSpec mode="change" ident="TEI">
    <attList>
        <attDef ident="rend" mode="replace" usage="req">
            <valList type="closed">
                <valItem ident="article">
                    <gloss>This is a full journal article.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="review">
                    <gloss>This is a review of a publication.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="editorial">
                    <gloss>This is editorial content.</gloss>
                </valItem>
            </valList>
        </attDef>
    </attList>
</elementSpec>

I'd previously removed commas in inline citations to comply with Chicago, in the part of the text I've marked up so far; went back and replaced them, to comply with APA.

Just heard from the editors that the board have decided to go with APA style for the online journal, so work done so far towards Chicago will have to be redone. First I have to get an APA style guide, then I'll have to re-edit some of the document I've already worked on, to undo changes I made to conform to Chicago (such as deleting commas between author and date in inline citations). Differences don't appear to be major, but they'll need some thought. This will delay us a bit.

Early decisions:

• Where acronyms appear in the text, they might appear in two forms simultaneously, if the authors have provided an inline expansion: with the <expan> first, followed by the <abbr>, or vice versa. In either case, the only one that should be marked up is the <abbr>, and it should be done as a <choice> tag:

  <choice><abbr>SLA</abbr><expan>Second Language Acquisition</expan></choice>
  

  Subsequent instances of the abbreviation can be marked simply with an <abbr> tag, and the XSLT can then retrieve the expansion as required from wherever it occurs in the document.
• Quotes will be rendered like this:

  <cit><quote>“a growing body of research indicating that mechanical drills do not facilitate the development of explicit or implicit knowledge”</quote> <ref target="#aski_2005">(Aski, 2005, p. 333)</ref></cit>
  

  However, it's not yet clear whether the original quotes should be left in place or not; awaiting editorial decisions on this.
• Where a quotation appears without any associated reference (because the reference is elsewhere in the text, or implied), the reference is supplied in an empty ref tag:

  
  ...finding themselves in the familiar position of having to <cit><quote>"constantly reevaluate their services to meet the changing needs of their service population"</quote><ref target="#farkas_2007"></ref></cit> and continuing in the struggle to <cit><quote>"define themselves as more than a repository for books"</quote><ref target="#farkas_2007"></ref></cit>, ...
  

  This enables all quotes to be linked to a reference.

One made during this markup: When an item has no author or editor under which to list it, the <title> element will have a child <name> element which will be detected by the XSLT; the XSLT will then use that as the initial part of the entry.

It turns out that <textDesc> will absolutely not do for the document type, so I'm now looking at using an @rend attribute on the <fileDesc> element; that seems appropriate, given that the distinction is primarily being made for the purposes of rendering the output.

Lots more back and forth on this through TEI-L, along with discussion of how to handle forenames. I also marked up a large block of the bibliography for the first article, and sent a query over to the editors about one item.

Some useful feedback from Lou on the TEI list about where to encode the info relating to the journal issue and volume. As a result, I've now moved the journal title itself into <seriesStmt>, along with the other related info:

           <seriesStmt>
                <title level="j">IALLT Journal</title>
                <idno type="vol">39</idno>
                <idno type="issue">1</idno>
                <respStmt>
                    <resp>editor</resp>
                    <name>
                        <forename>Heather</forename>
                        <surname>McCullough</surname>
                    </name>
                    <name>
                        <forename>Douglas W.</forename>
                        <surname>Canfield</surname>
                    </name>
                </respStmt>
            </seriesStmt>

I have a couple of issues still in discussion on the list, including how to encode the text type; I think the best solution would be this:

   <profileDesc>
      <textDesc n="article"></textDesc>
   </profileDesc>

where the @n attribute is constrained to a list of fixed values by a modification in the ODD file. Still waiting for feedback from the list on this.

Finally, I wrote to the IALLT folks to check whether it would be OK to use a block of their metadata in the TEI Guidelines, once all this is agreed on.

Mapped out a header for the first of the sample documents, with only a couple of pieces of info still missing (journal volume and issue, and page numbers). Sent that to the TEI list for some comments, along with a request for suggestions about how to encode the missing info.

Then continued encoding the bibliography of the sample doc. Decided on two things:

• Article titles will have trailing periods inside their tags (because sometimes they have question marks or exclamation marks instead, and it's simpler just to include whatever punctuation should be there, rather than try to add it in later).
• Dates should have no content, just a when attribute: <date when=2006"></date>.

Got the first sample documents from the IALLT folks. First off, I went through the previous edition they sent (which I also happen to have in hard copy), and got confirmation of a number of details with regard to layout, running titles etc. (see the email correspondence for details). Next, I started doing the markup, beginning with the header and then going on to the reference list. As I come across each specific type of reference, I'm documenting it by example, and also writing the XSLT template(s) needed to get it into XHTML. This will be a long slow process, but it should give us a very flexible system in the end. So far I've done only journal articles.

Started working on the schema for teiJournal, with Roma and a sample document, which I'm also marking up, bit by bit. I hit two problems today:

• The <affiliation> element was not available as a sibling of <name>. I want to use it as part of the <biblStruct> which will appear in the <sourceDesc>, from which all other title/author info in the document is derived, and so I need to put the affiliation into the author tag, but <affiliation> is not part of model.addressLike. I confirmed that with the TEI list, and then customized my ODD file and generated a new schema which allows me to use it where I need it.
• My plan to use XInclude to reduce duplication and redundancy in the TEI file has been somewhat undermined by the fact that oXygen cannot validate a file which contains XIncludes pointing at other locations in the same document. There seems to be no workaround. I've posted a message to the oXygen forums (which were down for most of the day). If this doesn't work, I need to make sure at the very least that eXist can handle the expansion of such XIncludes, otherwise the whole plan will be scuppered, and we'll have to go back to having three copies of the title and authors in the TEI file. That's really bad from the point of view of making life bearable for folks doing markup.