teiJournal

Drafted an abstract as a way of getting a handle on reorganizing the structure, and wrote one more section, on publication engines.

Tweaked the configuration of Tomcat (in the conf section, as discussed in a previous posting) to add a new IP address to the "allowed" IPs, since the IALLT Journal is moving to a new server location. Asked the sysops to restart Tomcat.

More redaction of the first draft of the book chapter, culminating in a decision that we need to go back to the beginning, answer some basic questions about our intentions, and then rewrite. Sent materials and lots of questions back to LR for his comments. The deadline is already looming, but it's only after you've written most of it that you discover what you should have been writing about. At least I'm beginning to know more or less what my opinions are, which helps a bit...

Got a draft of the chapter from LR in MSWord format, and began some collaborative editing; I'm able to open a docx file in OOo, but I can only save a doc file, and we don't yet know whether the "change tracking" from OOo will be saved appropriately in doc format so LR can see my changes as changes. I did only six pages as an initial test; if we can work this way, I'll continue. The deadline looms.

It appears that CJBS will continue as "a publication of Nalanda College", so I've now redone the banner image for the flyer, incorporating that information in the same way it appeared in the original cover art.

The Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies is moving here under the auspices of MTA, so we'll be creating a website for it and a teiJournal installation. In the meantime, they'd like a flyer to take to the Congress at the end of May, so I've started work on logo/banner graphics, and a gatefold flyer like the one for ScanCan.

Did the second half of Dalvi. Lots of footnotes and references, so it's a bit time-consuming. One issue that needs some thought is the frequent appearance of Sanskrit terms, which are italicized; so far, I've been marking them as <foreign>, but most (not all) are actually terms in the sense of TEI <term>, and probably ought to be marked as such; however, if there's no plan to do anything with terms (such as index and define them), then that would be needless work. We can always find all instances of <foreign> and re-examine them at a later date, if we want to make some of them as <term> as well; and since both would have the same effect on the output (italicization), this would change nothing.

As I work through the Dalvi text, I'm implementing what was described in the previous post, and I thought I'd post a couple of examples of markup for later reference, subject to modification as the wrinkles are ironed out. Here's a blockquote:

<cit rend="block">
          <quote>Why have I left that undeclared?  Because it is unbeneficial, it does not belong to the fundamentals of spiritual life, it does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to Enlightenment, to <foreign>Nibbāna</foreign>.  That is why I have left it undeclared.<note corresp="#bodhi_2005"><title level="m">In the Buddha’s Words</title>, 230-33.</note></quote>
</cit>

The <note> element here occurs within the <quote> element; I'm not sure if that's the right place for it, but it's probably simplest because it ensures that the note number occurs attached to the quote, as opposed to wrapped to the block below. In contrast, with inline quotes, we have a different setup:

<cit><quote>It is by understanding the nature of reasoned inquiry, epistemology and debating theory that one attains the highest goal (nihṣreyasa).</quote><note corresp="#vidyabhusana_1990"><title level="m">Nyāya Sutra</title> 1.1.1.</note></cit>

Here we don't want the <note> inside the <quote> element, because that would place it inside the quotation marks if these are being supplied by the rendering code; however, it remains inside the <cit> tag, ensuring that the reference is associated closely with the quotation.

So far so good...

In marking up the next CJBS article, I've discovered that it has both note-references and a full bibliography. This raises a slight issue that I'll have to deal with. Up to now, I have the following patterns:

• Notes are notes -- text, rather than pointers to references. In this case, the <note> element has text in it.
• Notes point directly to a full citation, in which case the <note> element contains nothing at all; it has @corresp pointing to the bibliographical item in the biblio list at the end. In the Sumegi text, this is the pattern, and the bibliography itself is not reproduced other than in the notes.
• References are done through author-date items in the text itself, which are linked through a ref element to the relevant biblio item (<ref target="#spodark_2005">Spodark, 2005</ref>); in this case, the biblio list is reproduced at the end in full. The IALLT Journal style works this way.

Now we have a fourth pattern exemplified in the Dalvi CJBS text:

• Note numbers in the text point to footnotes to brief citations (e.g. In the Buddha’s Words, 230-33.). The brief citation actually refers to a text which is in the full bibliography, which is also reproduced (above the endnotes), but there's no explicit link between the short endnote and the biblio item; the reader has to figure out that relationship for him or herself.

To deal with this, I think we need to operate as follows:

• The note element should contain the text of the note, as normal. However, it should also have @corresp, pointing to the bibliographical entry, if there is one.
• The processing code for XHTML should automatically provide a link to pop up the full biblio entry from the endnote, so the user can click on the endnote number to see the endnote itself (the short citation), and then click on something else to show the full biblio entry. Another option is to make the short citation in the endnote a <ref> element itself, thus turning it into a link automatically. This would perhaps be more consistent with other types of referencing above.
• We need a way in the XML to distinguish between a listBibl which is not displayed (as in the Sumegi text) and one which is (as in the Dalvi). Previously I was assuming that the existence of @corresp attributes on note elements would be enough to distinguish a text using that form of referencing (in which the actual listBibl is not displayed) from one in which it is displayed; but now that won't work (and in any case it was a bit arbitrary). So perhaps the best option is to distinguish two types of div in the back element:
  • //text/back/div[@type="bibliogr"] (the normal type up to now, which is displayed).
  • //text/back/div[@type="refList"] (the type exemplified by the Sumegi text, which is not displayed, but from which the endnote references are drawn).
  This has the advantage of being backwards-compatible with the IALLT Journal code; it just requires a modification to the Sumegi and Valliere texts in CJBS.

Having just marked up five book reviews for ScanCan in P4, I'm coming to the first instance of a book review for the teiJournal system, and I'm anxious to avoid the error-prone repetition that the old system suffers from. I'll document all my steps here:

• A book review is a little odd in that it has two titles: the title of the review, and the title of the book itself. It also needs to have a solid encoding of the bibliographical information relating to the book being reviewed, and ideally this info is only encoded in one place. I've elected to place it in a <biblStruct> element directly inside the main article title (<title level="a">). This is a provisional decision; I'm still not sure how I'd handle the range of possible situations. I imagine, though, that this setup will handle three situations: where there's one book, where there's more than one book (just two <biblStruct>s, and where there's an actual title for the review that isn't the same as the book(s) reviewed; in the last case, I'll probably just add text before the first <biblStruct>, and have the XSLT detect that text and respond accordingly.
• There are two levels of affiliation information, short and long (the print volume includes a section with long affiliations). The <affiliation> tag itself doesn't allow @type (why? this seems arbitrary), so I've elected simply to use two tags, with the short annotation first, and the long one second.