Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

James and Sebastian seem to have written the conversion in 2010; I 
wonder if it was really just a tool to convert the OTA texts to TEI, 
rather than something more generic.

I found this discussion too, which I'd forgotten about:

<http://tei-l.970651.n3.nabble.com/COCOA-anyone-td4026219.html>

and as Piotr says there, the Wikipedia entry for COCOA advertises our 
continuing support for it, so if we do retire this conversion rather 
than try to fix it (if that's even possible), we'll have to remember to 
update the Wikipedia entry too.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2017-01-06 12:17 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> 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
>
>