Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

Hi James,

Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like we should continue to 
support Cocoa as well as we can. I've made an issue and assigned it to you:

<https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/issues/222>

All the best,
Martin

On 2017-01-09 03:57 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>
> 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
>>>
>
>