[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 03 : Bettivia and Flanders

[Julia Flanders]

There are several ways gender might register in the markup. I think what Kevin was probably thinking of is part of a larger mechanism for representing a variety of personal detail about individuals who are mentioned in texts. I'm not sure how familiar you are with TEI/XML markup; if the example below isn't clear, please let me know and I can elaborate.

The transcription of the source material might look like this (a paragraph of prose with references to individual people):

<p>It was on that first day of spring in 2015 that <name ref="#julia">Julia</name> found herself driving through the back roads of Smithfield when abruptly she found her way blocked by a white van, buried up to the axles in a snowbank.</p>

Then elsewhere in the TEI file, there's a set of editorial data about the people named in the text:

<listPerson>
   <person xml:id="julia" sex="2">
	<persName>Julia Flanders</persName>
	<birth when="1965-02-21">
		<placeName>New York City</placeName>
	</birth>
   </person>
</listPerson>

So gender in this particular case is represented through a numeric code (the TEI happens to use the ISO standard codes for representing gender) but it could just as easily be represented using different terminology and encoding mechanisms, e.g.:

<listPerson>
   <person xml:id="julia" gender="female">
	<persName>Julia Flanders</persName>
	<birth when="1965-02-21">
		<placeName>New York City</placeName>
	</birth>
	<gender>Female</gender>
   </person>
</listPerson>

If one were interested in representing discussions of gender, rather than the gender of specific named entities, one could do that using a mechanism such as this one:

<p ana="#gender">[sample paragraph discussing gender; I'm too lazy to come up with a good example.]</p>

<interpGrp>
	<interp xml:id="gender">Keyword representing discussions of gender...</interp>
</interpGrp>

In the example above, the <interp> element serves to define and anchor a keyword which can then be applied to the text by using an attribute (@ana in this case) to reference it.

Let me know if you have questions--

best, Julia

> On Mar 20, 2015, at 7:22 PM, B. Bogart <ben at ekran.org> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I'd like to here more about this issue of representing gender. We did
> touch on it last week, but it felt like it never really got fleshed out.
> How is gender represented in standardized markup language?
> 
> On 15-03-18 07:33 PM, Hamilton, Kevin wrote:
>> Julia wouldn't remember me I'm sure, but I had the pleasure of taking a
>> TEI workshop from her once, in my first (and last) introduction to the
>> complexities of standardized markup language for scholarly texts. I
>> remember hearing her and the other workshop leader talking about the
>> question of gender, for example, and what fields might exist in a
>> standardized markup language for indicating the gender of a character in a
>> narrative, etc. What a rich opening for newbies like me, to see where
>> matters of gender get literally encoded in machine-readable language, but
>> also debated through those looking to set standards, arbitrate them,
>> comment on them, etc. (Sorry for the broad brush Julia, but something
>> stuck in there for me, even if it wasn't what was really going on : )
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