The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0068  Sunday, 26 February 2006

From: 		Gabriel Egan <
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Date: 		Tuesday, 21 Feb 2006 10:43:49 -0000
Subject: 17.0058 An XML Schema for Shakespeare's Plays
Comment: 	Re: SHK 17.0058 An XML Schema for Shakespeare's Plays

A debate about XML schemas will probably make sense to fewer 
SHAKSPERians than a debate about proclitic and enclitic microphrases, 
but I think I can spot when two people are talking past (rather than to) 
one another.

David Crystal writes:

 >We did a full XML tagging of all the texts we used (mainly
 >the New Penguin Shakespeare) in the Shakespeare's Words
 >project: the functionality can be seen at www.shakespeareswords.com.
 >If anyone wants to see a sample of that tagging, they can contact
 >me offline.

To do tagging, one has to decide on a set of tags and the rules for how 
those tags may be used. A pair of tags to show where pages start and 
stop might be <page>and </page>, so that a titlepage to a book would be 
tagged like this:

     <page>
     This history of King Lear
     </page>

A rule might be that, by definition, a 'line' is always smaller than and 
wholly contained within a page, and by this rule the following would be 
permissible

     <page>
     <line>The history of King Lear</line>
     </page>

but the following would be (by definition, and no matter what the text 
being tagged actually has written in it) impermissible:

     <line>
     <page>The history of King Learn</page>
     <line>

Before Crystal's XML-tagged text was created, someone must have agreed 
on an XML schema that defined the tags and the rules of their 
combination. Crystal hasn't said anything about what that schema is. 
Peter Paolucci's original request seemed to be for partners in creating 
a schema that will allow tagging that suits all sorts of interest 
groups, including (but not limited to) linguists such as Crystal.

I'd be interested to hear from Crystal what his schema was, and from 
Paolucci what he thinks of it in relation to his project.

Gabriel Egan

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