Re: [Indic-texts] Sanskrit names for division types

On Fri, Nov 02 2018, Tyler Neill wrote:

Agreed, Peter. To rephrase: I would be happy with whatever makes it possible for various mid-level users (whether of XML/XSLT or of the particular work or literary genre) to understand and manipulate the material within a few minutes. The @n and @subtype attributes seem to be doing the majority of that user-friendliness work here; perhaps the @type attribute goes too far, as you say. But whether a few more or a few less, I think the basic feedback to Patrick's question remains the same: Such attributes need not be required by the guidelines, but they can still serve to conveniently store annotations concerning traditional structural information.

Thank you for your answers so far: I’m convinced now that it’s useful to have these attributes. What I’m not yet sure about is whether their proposed mark up is satisfactory. I have doubts in two areas: 1) Ease of use/accessibility Something like this was suggested: <div n="1" type="level1" subtype="volume"> <div n="1" type="level2" subtype="āhnika"> </div> <div n="1" type="level2" subtype="āhnika"> </div> </div> Does the value of the @type represent something that’s in the book (as a printed, material thing) or the text (as an abstract thing)? If not, and the attribute values “level1” or “level2” only indicate how many “div-s” down the current element is, then it seems redundant. (I think also Peter tends towards this opinion.) Granted, with their presence it’s obvious at first sight where you are in the document, but probably, after some exposure to xml technologies, you’ll find it easier and more reliable to query the document itself for this information, rather than rely on these indicators. 2) @type/@subtype More problematical, IMO, is the relation of @type/@subtype. @subtype is described like this: “subtype: provides a sub-categorization of the element, if needed” (at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.typed.html) I think the relation of these two attributes is quite literal. The Guidelines have examples like “sentence/declarative”, “phrase/preposition”, “word/noun”, etc. So, with this expectation, what the @type/@subtype we’re discussing would tell us is that a “volume” div is a subtype of a “level1” div, and that an “āhnika” div is a subtype of a “level2” div. This seems to be mixing things of different categories. Additionally, the value of the @type would change depending on whether the book has volumes, parts, or only chapters. But I suppose that “āhnika” could be used in all three, and would thus clearly not be a subtype of a “levelX” div. Something like this should really be sufficient: <div n="1" type="āhnika"> </div> (And it would solve my two problems.)

On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 7:17 AM Peter Scharf wrote:

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It is not really necessary to include level1, level2 in every div. One could describe this structure, namely, that level1 is volume, level 2 is Ahnika, etc., in the header in machine readable form.

This is a good suggestion, too. I don’t know how to make these things machine-readable in TEI, but I’ve found myself using the @ana attribute frequently to link interpretations with elements, e.g.: <div n="1" ana="#āhnika"> </div> And somewhere else (in the document or separately): <interp xml:id="āhnika">Section of text manageable in a day.</interp> This would also allow you to attach multiple interpretations: <div n="1" ana="#āhnika #pariccheda-as-defined-by-dominik"> </div> (For @ana, see http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.global.analytic.....) But it is not machine-readable (unless we introduce some restrictions on the content of the tei:interp elements). About tei:interp, the TEI Guidelines say (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/AI.html#AISP): “The same analysis may be expressed with the interp element instead of the span element; this element provides attributes for recording an interpretive category and its value, as well as the identity of the interpreter, but does not itself indicate which passage of text is being interpreted; the same interpretive structures can thus be associated with many passages of the text.” For SARIT, I think it would be very useful to have a central and visible list of such tei:interp elements that one could link the @ana against, in various texts. Any volunteers? Or other ideas of how to coordinate the types/analysis across multiple texts? -- Patrick