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

To agree with Lou by disagreeing on one point:

I wouldn't describe the distinction that TEI makes between "place name" and
"place" (and between personal name and person) as "old-fashioned". Rather,
it's an essential, scholarly/analytical distinction, and one that makes TEI
exceptionally well-suited for working with textual sources that mention --
and (in combination) structured information about -- past places, imagined
places, contingent places, etc. "Place" is a cognitive construct. "Place
name" (in text encoding) is a sequence of characters in a writing system
that are understood to refer to a place. There can be other textual
references to a place: descriptions, euphemisms, puns, allusions, ethnica,
etc.

T



-- 
Tom Elliott, Ph.D.
Associate Director for Digital Programs and Senior Research Scholar
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU)
http://isaw.nyu.edu/people/staff/tom-elliott


On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 6:21 AM, Lou Burnard <[email protected]>
wrote:

> 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
>>
>