Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

It wouldn't surprise me if there were still some COCOA-style marked up 
texts out there in the wild, unlikely as it seems. If there are any, 
though, they might well find this conversion instructive, largely 
because of what it doesn't do.

 From a TEI standpoint, the syntax of COCOA files  suffers three major 
drawbacks:

a) you can only mark points in the text with things that look like tags, 
not spans
b) if you must mark spans, you do it with arbitrary "special characters" 
that act like brackets
c) there's no way of specifying what any of the markup is supposed to 
mean, so deciding how to map it to TEI has to be done on a case by case 
basis.

Probably the only useful (i.e. generic) COCOA convertor would be one 
that turns e.g. <X foo> into <milestone unit="X" value="foo"/> and
%wibble% into <hi rend="percent">wibble</hi> (and even then you'd have 
to make assumptions about which characters count as "special").

Oh, and of course in really hardcore COCOA files, you can redefine the 
characters to mean absolutely anything, e.g. whether they are 
punctation, "special characters", space equivalents, multiple digraphs, 
or whatever. That's just how we used to roll pre-Unicode children.


  On 06/01/17 18:26, Martin Holmes wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The TEI Stylesheets system includes code for converting the old COCOA 
> text encoding system:
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOA_(digital_humanities)>
>
> into TEI. That code is not actually working; it produces invalid TEI, 
> as you can see if you run "make test" and then validate cocoatest.xml 
> or cocoatest2.xml. Obviously that should be fixed, but it occurs to me 
> to wonder whether there's actually any utility at this point in 
> maintaining a Cocoa-to-TEI converter at all. The only archive I'm 
> aware of with texts in Cocoa is the Oxford Text Archive, and as far as 
> I can see from a quick investigation, all of those files have been 
> converted to TEI already.
>
> Does anyone know of any significant texts encoded in Cocoa which have 
> not yet been converted to TEI? If there are none left in the wild, we 
> could quietly retire this particular conversion format and reduce our 
> maintenance and testing burden.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin