trip report
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Reply-To: The Computerised Analysis of Biblical Texts Discussion Group
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Sender: The Computerised Analysis of Biblical Texts Discussion Group
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From: Winfried Bader <winfried.bader@ZDV.UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE>
Subject: trip report
To: Multiple recipients of list AIBI-L
<AIBI-L%UOTTAWA.BITNET@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Dear colleagues in the AIBI world,
I did a trip to a conference outside of our little world bible and
computer to the "First Conference on Computer Processing of Medieval
Slavic Manuscripts" hold 24-28 July in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. Because the
themes and problems of this conference and my functions there are
closely related to our work on bible and computer I think it is
interesting for this discussion list to give a brief report.
The 50 scholars meeting there are working all with slavic manuscripts,
many of them with biblical staff, some of them therefor involved in
textcritical problems especially for the Greek versions of the biblical
text. They have all a very good knowledge about textcriticism, the
problems of encoding manuscripts and a good feeling for methodological
problems in this field. The problems are similar to ours: how two handle
non Latin characters, how to encode all the details of the manuscripts
but not to loose the text.
Some of them are also interested in linguistical and grammatical analysis
of these texts. There will be proceedings of this conference and I'll
point you to them.
I was invited to do three presentations on this conference:
1. Paper: Bible and Computer.
A Brief History of the last Ten Years
===============================================
The opening session of this conference was dedicated to the theme "The
State of the Art". I was invited to give in this opening session a report
on what is going on outside the slavic scholarly community. I told the
history of bible and computer as the history of our AIBI-conferences.
I started with the encoding of the biblical text. We begun with this
encoding in the age of punch card, without any possibility to present
Hebrew and Greek characters neither on the screen nor on the paper.
Therefor a transcriptions within the 7-bit-ASCII-character-set was chosen.
And this disadvantage of this former times is nowadays our great
advantage, that we have a machine and system independent data format for
the biblical text which we can share all over the world.
The development in the slavic field is the other way round: they begun
all with lovely graphics on proprietary systems and are now not able to
share their texts. The workshop was the start to teach them, how to
encode texts for data interchange.
2. TUSTEP
=========
My second presentation was a demonstration of TUSTEP (Tuebingen
University System for TExtprocessing Programs), a scholarly tool to do
all the basic operations you need, if texts are the object
of your investigation, beginning with encoding, comparing texts, indexing,
sorting, up to making lovely and sophisticated printouts or to make
algorithmic analysis.
3. TEI-Workshop (TEI = Text Encoding Initiative)
================================================
This presentation I did on this conference is related to the AIBI, too.
On behalf of the AIBI I am member in the advisory board of the TEI. And
in the name of the AIBI I gave my endorsement to the guidelines in summer
1993. The guidelines came out in spring 1994 and are now available in
hardcopy or on CD-Rom. The guidelines of the TEI are a SGML-application
to enable the encoding of texts from all the fields of the humanities
(transcription of speech to sophisticated critical editions) for data
interchange to guarantee long life and multi use of electronical data.
The TEI-workshop in Blagoevgrad was done by Prof. David Birnbaum
(Pittsburgh, PA), Dr. Harry Gaylord (Groningen, The Netherlands), Dr.
Nicholas Finke (Cincinnati, OH) and me.
The audience
============
On that conference met about 50 scholars from Bulgaria, Macedonia,
Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, Sweden, The
Netherlands, United Kingdom and the USA. All scholars were dedicated to
the edition of Medieval Slavic Manuscripts, and to the linguistical,
grammatical or historical interpretation of this texts.
Mostly all of them were using the computer, but on different levels:
from simple text processing up to sophisticated programs. The common
problem of all of them was how to treat non English, non Latin, non
printed information in the computer with all the details of the
manuscripts, the special characters, the different writing systems and
the historical orthography. The solution were a lot of different
proprietary programs to handle the special fonts, to handle the
linguistical analysis, to make special print outs. But the interchange
of data between this system is mostly impossible. The main goal of the
conference was to discuss the necessity of data interchange and to see a
possible technical solution. In the context of this discussion the
TEI-workshop was placed.
The schedule
============
For the TEI-workshop we had two afternoons of this 5-day-conference:
Wednesday afternoon 2-7 for a classroom session and Friday afternoon for
a hands on session in a PC-lab.
The topics
==========
For this specific audience with experience of computers but with no
experience of generic markup we chose the following topics.
Topic Instructor Time needed
1. Introduction to Markup Harry 20 min.
2. SGML Introduction David 30 min.
3. How to read a DTD David 15 min.
4. Document Analysis Winfried 30 min.
5. What is the TEI Winfried 10 min.
6. Ongoing TEI-projects: a brief overview Harry 10 min.
7. TEI basics (core, chunks, phrase el.) Nicholas 30 min.
===== coffee break =====
8. TEI header Nicholas 25 min.
9. Character sets (WSD) David 15 min.
10. Linking Harry 30 min.
11. Critical Apparatus Winfried 25 min.
12. Primary Sources Harry 15 min.
13. Practical TEI Software: an overview Harry/Nicholas 15 min.
===== Friday afternoon =====
14. Hands on session: Author/Editor all 2 hours
We presented all the topics with overhead slides, some of them came from
the teaching material of the Chicago meta workshop 1993, most of them
were produced especially for the Blagoevgrad workshop.
We did not use examples from the research field of the audience for two
reasons: Nicholas and I have no slavic background, David and Harry did
not want to initiate a scholarly discussion. The main reason was that we
wanted to separate the problem of writing systems which is always
necessary for slavic manuscripts, and the ongoing discussion about this
topic on the conference, from the other TEI problems.
We did not go very deep into technical details. For the SGML
introduction the goal was, to enable the audience to read a SGML
document and a DTD, to have a idea of the special characters and
delimeters you can found inside such a document (and that is not a lot:
< > & ; is all you have to know).
In the other topics we wanted to demonstrate the main mechanisms this
audience need for their special problems: linking, critical apparatus,
transcription of primary sources. We wanted to show that also difficult
problems of encoding manuscripts can be handled by TEI markup.
The only topic we went into some technical details was the writing
system declaration.
====================================================================
Dr. Winfried Bader
University of Tuebingen
Center for Data Processing
Brunnenstrasse 27
D-72074 Tuebingen