I wasn't in the discussion that led to it, but I am not sure that I see the point of this. It reminds us that (a) we have translated examples for French and Chinese many times much more than for other languages (b) they are of rather varied quality -- many of the Chinese ones, I believe, simply translate the English ones, rather than seeking out comparable natively Chinese examples. And other than that, it enables little beyond linguistic tourism (for which surely there are easier interfaces). And checking up on the quality and quantity of examples is not hard to do with a simple xPath of the source is it? Or don't we do xpath any more? I do, so here are some numbers for my copy of the last release

number of exemplum elements : 1913

number in languages other than English : 1152 (60%) or 1015 (53%) if you discount the non-linguistic or multi-language ones

of which: 547  (nearly half) are in french;  433 in zh-TW (nearly the other half); 88 in 'und' (i.e. not in any language) ; 49 in 'mul' (i.e. multiple languages) ; 31 are in 'de',  and 2 each for la and no

so, if you want more diversity, just look at the French version!

Dear Council,

After I had to exit early from this morning's Stylesheets meeting I was eager to see how Syd's "Copia" output of the Guidelines turned out. (For those who missed it, Syd found a quick way to output the Guidelines in a way that would prevent suppression of examples in other languages, and this seems mainly to affect the way the Guidelines Spec pages turn out (not the Guidelines chapter examples). I saw in the minutes that we're asked to review Syd's interesting output, named "Copia" (for more copious examples) and report back to the Council list. So started exploring element spec pages a little this evening. Here's what I'm finding:

The bibl element is much improved by the Copia output: the examples are far more diverse, but not bewildering in number. I think it is fascinating to see non-English variety: 

• Copia: https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/html_GLs_all_eg_en/ref-bibl.html
• Current: https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-bibl.html

The byline element is similarly a lot more interesting now:

• Copia: https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/html_GLs_all_eg_en/ref-byline.html
• Current: https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-byline.html

The gap element seems similarly improved, though there's a little problem here:

• Copia: https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/html_GLs_all_eg_en/ref-gap.html
• Current: https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-gap.html

What I noticed right away was, the number of examples did not seem overwhelming, and the variety of languages evident before you had to click "Show All" reflects a good diversity with Asian languages rising to the fore. However(!) the duplicate example jumps out--duplicates in English. Turns out the French exemplum is identical to the English here, and I"m not really sure why. I think I've seen that in other specs as well. 

Meanwhile, the element p looks a bit more interesting now, and I think it improves on the current output: 

• Copia: https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/html_GLs_all_eg_en/ref-p.html 
• Current: https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-p.html

How about ab? Completely boring: no change at all, and it's sadly evident that we don't have enough examples in the first place. (If that isn't a ticket yet, it should be!)

• Copia: https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/html_GLs_all_eg_en/ref-ab.html
• Current: https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-ab.html 

Okay-that's a start: a review of 5 out of 582 element specs (less than one percent...sigh). But so far I like the Copia version for what it illuminates about our range of exempla, both where it is diverse and where it is lacking.

Looking forward to hearing what others think!

Elisa

--

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD

Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities |  Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College 

Development site: https://newtfire.org 

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