Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

Hi James,

I think the only good (or at least acceptable) argument is in your last 
line (plus your request to get this assigned):

 > since it used to work I'm suspecting that making its output valid 
again wouldn't necessarily be too difficult

-- otherwise, I can't see why the Council should devote any time to 
up-conversion from COCOA or any legacy format. This should always, IMO, 
be an issue for a local project (formal or informal: funded or performed 
as e.g. a semester assignment or on a friend-to-friend basis). I feel 
scared by the prospect that Council time (including F2F time) might get 
allocated to such matters, seeing the flood of _current_ issues at GitHub.

Best regards,

   Piotr




On 01/09/2017 12:57 PM, 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
>>>
>
>