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

Interesting set of questions!

I'll just address this one for now:

"the physical places I want to tag ... manifest in the text in a variety 
of ways"

The TEI is a bit old fashioned perhaps in making a strong ontological 
distinction between tagging about a named entity (a place) and its 
manifestation (a placename). That's because it is, after all, the TEXT 
encoding initiative, not the THING encoding initiative. So the name of a 
place as it appears in a document is an intimate part of the document, 
which you might well want to tag as signalling something or other. 
Whereas all the things you might want to say about the thing being 
signalled are probably not present in the document at all, or not in the 
same place, or not in the same way. So we have both <placeName> for the 
former and <place> for the latter. You might lump together all the names 
used for a place as child elements of a <place> element, along with some 
indication of the way in which the names are applied, and also along 
with geographical information relating to the place as a real world 
object. That isn't a part of your text in the same way as the references 
to it and you would typically not put it inside your transcription but 
inside the metadata for describing it. You might simply flag all the 
references as they occur within the document and indicate that each one 
is "about" the same thing by means of a @ref or @key attribute on the 
reference. You might do both!


On 14/03/17 01:41, Megan Cytron wrote:
> Hello--
> First off, apologies if this isn't the correct forum for this question.
>
> I'm just embarking on a doctoral dissertation in which I hope to do a spatial analysis of a rather complex 20th-century novel. I'm a programmer (in another life) and have quite a bit of experience with GIS and XML and was planning to use it to tag the text I'm analyzing so I can generate statistics, charts, maps and other data-driven visualizations of the novel's inner workings.
>
> After (re)discovering TEI (I worked with it way back in the 90s in a completely different way), it seems that I could adapt it to my use case, but I'm a bit uncertain of how best to capture all of the variables I want to look at. I have found many examples of TEI encoded texts, but none that go too deep into this particular brand of literary criticism. For example, these are some of the variables that interest me with a few examples:
>
> --mappable places  (physical locations in the plot, literary overlapping, allusions, trajectories, overlapping with author's biography)
> --changes in position (forward/backward/turns, uphill/downhill, stops,  fast/slow, inside/outside)
> --narration and voice (1st person, 3rd person, subjective/objective/omniscient, stream of consciousness)
> --semantic fields (colors, sickness, science, feelings, physical states, atmospheric conditions)
> --rhetorical devices (anaphora, metonymy, paranomasia, juxtaposition)
> --intertextuality (allusion, quotation, parody)
> --time alterations (analepsis/prolepsis/flash sideways/foreshadowing, anachronism)
> --verbs (type, aspect, mode, tense)
>
> I'm fully prepared to invent my own tagging scheme, if it makes sense to do so, but if something already exists and has been implemented with success, I'd much prefer to replicate what I can and contribute another example (or many!).
>
> Is anyone else using TEI in this way? Are there any resources (aside from the obvious TEI Guidelines) and especially examples that would be useful for someone just starting out? Or groups where folks are talking about projects like this and sharing experiences?
>
> In particular, I'm finding the "place" and "placename" tags to be somewhat confusing for what I want to do, because the physical places I want to tag (with lat/long coordinates and some fencing) manifest in the text in a variety of ways (proper names, metonymy, ellipsis, ironic allusions, via demonyms applied to people or objects, etc.).
>
> Any help or general "pointing in the right direction" that you may be able to offer would be greatly appreciated!
>
> --Megan