Category: Markup and Text Representation

Alex Sevigny pointed me to a post on the Linguist List (16.2917) about Ask-an-Expert System: Digitizing Lang Documentation. The announcement is for a system run by E-MELD, which is a project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation, for people to Ask an Expert. This is not a bot, the questions go to real human experts. Interesting way to support the community.

Google Sitemaps is a service to allow webmasters to describe what is changing on a site to make it easier for Google to index. There is an interview with the Google engineer at New “Google Sitemaps” Web Page Feed Program on SearchEngineWatch.
I wonder if wikis could be set up to create the sitemap automatically? This is courtesy of Matt Patey who pointed me to the Slashdot | Google Launches Google Sitemaps post.

According to a Microsoft Media Alert: Microsoft XML Architect to Unveil XML in “Office 11” At XML Conference & Exposition 2002. In Office 11 the native file formats will be XML! Neat, but will Microsoft the start extending and extinguishing XML once they have embraced it?

See also, Next Version of Office Will Use XML as the Default File Format. Thanks to Matt and Dwayne for alerting me to this.

According to CNET, Publishers balk at Google book copy plan. They are worried that Google’s Google Print project to scan books will violate copyright.
Continue reading Google and Publishers

Ever since I put a call out on Humanist for ideas around online publishing I have been discovering all sorts of systems and services. Scholarly Exchange is connected with Athabasca and charges a reasonable fee ($750) for hosting the workflow and publishing. They seem to support XML too.
Scholarly Exchange is the organization that provides the publishing service, but they are connected to International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication which is more of an association. ICAAP has a portal for readers to get news on journals.

Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Unsworth, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Burnard, is now available online in a preprint (or “preview”) form. It has been marked up in TEI XML and is available through the tei-c.org site. Note the new cocooned look of the TEI site!
The Table of Contents has links to the preview copies of the chapters. I note, for example, a chapter by Dino Buzzetti and Jerome McGann on Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon which includes stuff from Buzzetti that I heard at the Brown conference where I heard Buzzetti and Renear on markup.

The mSpace Classical Music Browser is a topic map browser … at least that’s what I think it is.
This is peek at the semantic web to come. In this case the topic is classical music. For more see, mSpace: exploring the New Web. (What, by the way, is the .fm namespace?)
Thanks to Chris McAllister for this link.

At the TEI members meeting way back in October in Baltimore (see previous entry, TEI Members’ Meeting), Lou Burnard gave a great talk about where the TEI is going and the ODD format used to manage the TEI documentation. Lou can give a brilliant talk when he chooses to explain things carefully to lesser minds; that the talk followed an incomprehensible talk aimed at an “in” crowd (making me feel stupid since I should be “in” but obviously wasn’t) made it stand out even more. In it Lou explained where P5 (the next version of the Text Encoding Initiative) was going and talked about ODD (or One Document Does it all.) ODD is an XML resource for documentation of the TEI that is used both for creating the TEI Guidelines and is now to be used to actually create the custom version of the TEI DTD or schema for individual projects.
What is neat about ODD is that it is a form of “literate programming” where the source ODD document can be used to generate both documentation and code (DTD or schema.)
Continue reading ODD (One Document Does it all) Literary programming for TEI

According to a BBC story titled, Google to scan famous libraries (Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004, BBC News, UK Edition), Google, working with the University of Michigan, will scan selected books from the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library. The scanned books will be mostly books out of copyright, and the online pages may have some links to Amazon. The full collection of seven million volumes will take six years to digitize at Michigan.
Continue reading Google Library Scanning

UMass Amherst reports that Researchers create tool to automatically search handwritten historical documents” href=”http://www.umass.edu/umhome/news/articles/7683.php”>Researchers create tool to automatically search handwritten historical documents. Working with 1,000 scanned pages of George Washington’s manuscripts, a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have developed a manuscript retrieval system that can find words like “regiment” in the handwritten manuscripts. There is a demo at Handwritten Manuscript Retrieval.
This is thanks to Matt Patey.