Re: TEI, literary analysis, spatial concerns, and GIS

Don't have time for a complete response now (and others can do better
than I, anyway), but a few quick thoughts.

 * This is correct forum.

 * While you may find it useful to extend the TEI to cover some of
   the things that interest you in more detail, it is probably a lot
   easier to start with TEI as a base than to start from scratch.
   (And, you may find you don't need to extend it.) That said,
   learning TEI and how to extend it is non-trivial. Thus there are
   those who find it easier to start from scratch.

 * As for references to places appearing in the text, as long as you
   can decide where the reference begins and ends, it really doesn't
   matter what type of reference it is, you can probably encode it
   with TEI out-of-the-box, and can certainly encode it with an
   extension.

   I.e., it doesn't matter if Metropolis is referred to as
   "Metropolis" (which would be tagged with <name> or <placeName>),
   "The Big Apricot" (which I would tag with <name type="nick">),
   "The City of Tomorrow" (which I might tag with <rs>), or by
   referring to Jimmy Olsen as a "Metropolan" (for which TEI doesn't
   have a very good element -- either <rs>, <phr>, or <seg> could be
   pressed into service, perhaps w/ type="demonym"). In all cases the
   phrase that refers to it can be linked to a data structure
   (encoded as a <place>, likely w/ type="fictional") that provides
   information about it. Because they all refer to the same
   structure, asking "find me all the phrases that refer to
   Metropolis" means just asking "fins me all the XML elements linked
   to this particular element", which is pretty easy to do.

-- 
 Syd Bauman, EMT-Paramedic
 Senior XML Programmer/Analyst
 Northeastern University Women Writers Project
 [email protected] or
 [email protected]