One of the best exchanges at the Brown Conference was between Dino Buzzetti, who gave a paper on “Markup and Text Representation”, and Allen Renear who responded on markup. Both are philosophers and their two papers stood out as a very careful working out of the question “what is markup?”
Buzzetti began by quoting Combs, Renear and DeRose (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 30, Issue 11, Nov. 1987, p 933-947),
Markup practices can affect the move towards systems that support scholars in the process of thinking and writing. Whereas procedureal and presentational markup systems retard that movement, descriptive markup systems accelerate the pace by simplifying mechanical tasks and allowing the authors to focus their attention on the content.
Buzzetti went on to say that
The adequacy of a digital text representation is to a great extent dependent upon the properties of markup. Markup behaves like a kind of diacritical notation and it performs an essential linguistic function in the digital representation of the text. The linguistic status of markup is characterized by a constitutive structural ambiguity. Markup is both part of the text and it says something about it. (My emphasis.)
Buzzetti’s argument:
“Punctuation is markup.
Reflection on punctuation is reflection on markup.
Punctuation is diacritical.
(therefore) All markup is diacritical.”
Renear agreed with Buzzetti. In fact Buzzetti quoted him to the effect:
However Iím inclined to suspect that the most difficult and consequential problems raised by the recognition that [Ö] some [markup] is [Ö] constitutive of the text it characterizes, will be new puzzles about just what markup really is, and in particular, when it is about a text and when it is part of a text . . . and when, and how, it may sometimes be both.
Allen Renear, ìThe descriptive/procedural distinction is flawed.î
Markup Languages: Theory & Practice 2.4 (2001), p. 419.
For Buzzetti markup accounts for the variation of the textual condition. (Jerome McGann) Text is not self-identical because it is self-reflexive and markup is one way in which it is self-reflexive – markup is both content and about the content.
Renear looked at the ontology in a widely used standard like FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) which has a hierarchy of 4 levels from work to expression to manifestation, to item.
In the questions it was pointed out that punctuation has served to indicate breathing and performance (how to read something out loud.) Markup can be seen as a type of code that guides performance by the computer – how the text should be rendered.