Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

Hi Elizabeth,

It's fascinating to see TactWeb still running and working well. I've 
never actually used it myself, but it still has a home page:

<http://tactweb.cch.kcl.ac.uk/doc/tact.htm>

which suggests that it uses its own Tact Database format (TDB) which you 
create with DOS TACT: "You will need basic DOS TACT (version 2.x) to 
create the databases that TACTweb can serve. All TACT software is 
available for free for academic purposes, and can be downloaded from 
ftp://chass.utoronto.ca/pub/cch/tact/tact2.1/. A special TACT component 
that is still being developed by the author is sgml2tdb -- software that 
can take a text marked up in an SGML markup scheme, and create a TACT 
database. This special TACT component is available from 
ftp://ic-unix.ic.utoronto.ca/pub/sgml2tdb." 
<http://tactweb.cch.kcl.ac.uk/doc/home.htm>

The download is no longer there, though.

This page suggests that you use the TACT MAKBAS function to create the 
TDB file:

<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/enquiry/tat06.html>

and you set specific configuration settings in MAKBAS to tell it whether 
you are using markup (i.e. some flavour of Cocoa), and if so, what your 
opening and closing brackets are.

For those documents you have which are still in Cocoa, can they be made 
public? If so, I bet if you share them online (through e.g. GitHub), 
someone with a couple of free afternoons will probably help with a 
conversion to TEI, especially if the Cocoa markup is simple or 
well-documented.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2017-01-06 04:28 PM, Elisabeth Burr wrote:
> Yes there are. There is for example my corpus of Romance Newspapers,
> parts of which can even be consulted online - thanks to the old TactWeb,
> which in my eyes should have been developed further, because the ideas
> behind it were great. See:
> http://home.uni-leipzig.de/burr/CorpusLing/Korpusanalyse/default.htm.
> Just click on one of the links.
>
> I know that there are problems. One edition of Le Monde has been loaded
> up in the wrong format (DOS-Text or Plain-Text, I can't remember). I
> never found the time to do something about it, but the material is there
> and should be converted. The Oxford Text Archive has converted part of
> my Italian Newspaper Language corpus I have contributed to the Archive,
> but as far as I remember it has been done by a student and most probably
> needs to be controlled.
>
> To keep things short, conversion from COCOA to TEI is not obsolete yet.
>
> Best Elisabeth who wishes the TEI people the very best for the new year
>
>
> Am 06.01.2017 um 21:17 schrieb Lou Burnard:
>> 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
>>
>>
>