Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

Hi Martin,

Apologies for the delay in answering.  In case anyone is 
interested in their history: Yes, that initial cocoa-to-xsl 
script was indeed written by me (and then improved substantially 
into doing multiple passes by Sebastian with additional debugging 
output).  My first attempts at doing so were to make the Cocoa 
file well-formed XML (through wrapping a root element around it, 
changing any individual tags to be milestone-like psuedo 
elements) which was done in Perl before using XSLT, and then 
running that through two stylesheets, one to transform the flat 
cocoa markup language to a flattened TEI markup language (i.e. 
rename things) and then the next to fill that flattened TEI with 
structure (using xsl:for-each-group).  The original files were 
written in 2004, with the express purpose of being used for a 
subset of the OTA consisting specifically of verse drama and I 
even spoke about this at ALLC-ACH 2004 in Gothenburg. The are 
available for now at 
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jamesc/research/cocoa2tei/ where I put 
them in early 2006. I was doing this in a very modular way with 
the intent of applying to different sorts of texts as well.  
Partly this was created to estimate for a (failed) funding bid by 
the OTA how much work it would take to convert a large portion of 
the OTA archives all to TEI (whilst maintaining the original 
files of course).  [If I remember the reviews correctly it failed 
partly because one reviewer was outraged that mere technicians 
might *change* the files lovingly crafted by academics, even 
though the bid clearly spelled out that this was only format 
conversion and that the original files would also remain 
available.  Ah well.] In 2010 as part of a business as usual 
drive to migrate some of the OTA texts into TEI P5, my email 
archive shows that Sebastian started working on a new 
cocoa-to-tei conversion and took my XSLT as the starting point 
and added the regex and an extra passes to do it all in a single 
XSLT while also making it a bit more general.  I contributed some 
bits and pieces.  That is probably why it isn't as generalised as 
it could be.  But I think it serves better as an example than a 
generalised conversion.

Although the OTA is now in the Bodleian Libraries, not here at IT 
Services, I doubt it will ever get rid of its Cocoa texts (even 
if it provides migrated versions of them). While it may be easier 
to just get rid of the conversion I would certainly be willing to 
give it a go in trying to fix it. (i.e. If you've made a github 
issue, feel free to assign to me.) As to why we should have and 
maintain legacy conversions like this, I would say that it is as 
an example for those approaching similar migration 
up-conversions.  I'm not saying that is a very good reason, but 
since it used to work I'm suspecting that making its output valid 
again wouldn't necessarily be too difficult.

-James

On 07/01/17 18:40, Martin Holmes wrote:
> What I'm actually trying to do is understand the situation 
> better, and I'm getting there. This is what I think we've learned:
>
>  - Cocoa is not very amenable to a generic conversion process, 
> since its syntax and usage is extremely variable;
>
>  - Our current Cocoa conversion script (James will hopefully 
> confirm or refute this) was written specifically to convert 
> certain OTA texts, and could not be applied generically;
>
>  - In any case, that script is broken (it produces invalid TEI);
>
>  - There is a possible way forward in writing a conversion that 
> creates milestone elements, as suggested by Lou, but that would 
> still depend on knowledge of the actual syntax and special 
> characters used in any specific set of texts;
>
>  - There are still some Cocoa texts out there which have not 
> yet been converted to TEI.
>
> What I take from this is that it would probably make more sense 
> to work with those people such as Elizabeth who have Cocoa 
> texts that matter, and get those converted to TEI; meanwhile we 
> could retire the conversion that doesn't work, and remove it 
> from the Stylesheets repo. This is obviously a question for 
> Council, though.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
>>
>> cheers
>> stuart
>>


-- 
Dr James Cummings, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford, 
TEI Consultations: [email protected]