Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

I'd forgotten that discussion on TEI-L too, and it's very entertaining! 
I also think the claim on Wikipedia that the TEI maintains this 
conversion needs a bit of attention. At best we could point to it as an 
example of how such a conversion might be done. But you need to 
understand both COCOA and XSLT to do it, and the number of such people 
available is dwindling daily...

I also just remembered that I once wrote an article documenting how I 
converted John Burrow's Austen texts (which were marked up in COCOA) to 
TEI once. If I can find it, I'll post it.



On 06/01/17 20:24, Martin Holmes wrote:
> 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
>>
>>