Chapter 1— Making Technology Work for Scholarship Investing in the Data
1. Ian Graham's HTML Sourcebook: A Complete Guide to HTML 3.o, 2d ed. (Wiley, 1996), especially the beginning of chapter 3, gives an excellent overview of the characteristics of a book in the context of a discussion of the design of electronic resources. The third edition of this book was published early in 1997.
2. Jay David Bolter's Writing Spaces: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Erlbaum, 1991) expands on some of these ideas. See also George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Johns Hopkins, 1992) and my own Knowledge Representation, a paper commissioned as part of the Getty Art History Information Program (now the Getty Information Institute) Research Agenda for Humanities Computing, published in Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage (Getty Information Institute, 1996), 31-34, and also available at http://www.ahip.getty.edu/agenda/represen.html.
3. These terms, among others, have been used by the Model Editions Partnership ( http://mep.cla.sc.edu ).
4. This was the planning meeting for the Text Encoding Initiative project. It was held in November 1987.
5. C.J. Date, An Introduction to Database Systems, 4th ed. (Addison Wesley, 1986), is a good introduction to relational database technology.
6. By far the most useful starting point for information about SGML is the very comprehensive Web site at http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/. This site is maintained and updated regularly by Robin Cover of the Summer Institute for Linguistics.
7. The TEI's Web site is at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei. It contains links to electronic versions of the TEI Guidelines and DTDs as well as to projects that are using the DTD.
8. See Richard Giordano, "The Documentation of Electronic Texts Using Text Encoding Initiative Headers: An Introduction," Library Resources and Technical Services 38 (1994): 389ff, for a detailed discussion of the header from the perspective of someone who is both a librarian and a computer scientist.
9. More information about the EAD can be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/ead. This site has examples of the Library of Congress EAD projects. Others can be found via links from the SGML Web site.
10. This example can be seen at http://www.ceth.rutgers.edu/projects/griffis/project.htm. The site also provides instructions for downloading the Panorama SGML viewer.
11. See Yuri Rubinsky, "Electronic Texts the Day After Tomorrow," in Visions and Opportunities in Electronic Publishing: Proceedings of the Second Symposium, December 5-8, 1992, ed. Ann Okerson (Association for Research Libraries, 1993), 5-13, also available at http://arl.cni.org: 80/scomm/symp2/rubinsky.html. Rubinsky was the founder of SoftQuad and a leading figure in the SGML community until his tragic early death in January 1996.
12. There is a useful set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on XML at http://www.ucc.ie/xml/. See also the XML section of the SGML Web site at http://www.oasis-open . .org/cover/related.html.
13. See note 3.
14. The Orlando Project's Web site is at http://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO.
15. For a more detailed and very useful discussion of these issues, see Liora Alschuler, ABCD ... SGML: A User's Guide to Structured Information (International Thompson Computer Press, 1995), especially chapters 5 through 9. Alschuler shares my view that it is very difficult to make general statements about the value of SGML-based projects since SGML can mean so many different things. Chapter 4 of her book consists of a series of case studies. It begins with a caveat: "anyone looking for a picture of a typical SGML implementation, look elsewhere," and then goes on: "These case studies represent the richness and diversity of real-world implementations, not the mythical norm." Elsewhere Alschuler notes that "ultimately the most profound impact of converting to structured information may be on the products you produce rather than on the methods you use to produce them" (186).
16. In order to deal with the problem of overlap, the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen ( http://www.hit.uib.no/wab ) have devised their own encoding scheme, MECS (Multi-Element Code System). MECS contains some of the properties of SGML, but has simpler mechanisms for structures that are cumbersome in SGML. However, the use of their own encoding scheme has meant that they have had to develop their own software to process the material.
17. For a longer discussion of new questions posed by the use of SGML and especially its perceived lack of semantics, see C. M. Sperberg-McQueen's closing address to the SGML92 conference at http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml92p.html. He notes: "In identifying some areas as promising new results, and inviting more work, there is always the danger of shifting from 'inviting more work' to 'needing more work' and giving the impression of dissatisfaction with the work that has been accomplished. I want to avoid giving that impression, because it is not true, so I want to make very clear: the questions I am posing are not criticisms of SGML. On the contrary, they are its children.... SGML has created the environment within which these problems can be posed for the first time, and I think part of its accomplishment is that by solving one set of problems, it has exposed a whole new set of problems.''