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

[Bettivia, Rhiannon Stephanie]

Thank you, Julia, for all the time and consideration you have put into
responding to all the questions that have arise around this topic.  As we
get ready to close the week out, I will pose a final question inspired by
some of the recent discussion and your TEI example.

You mentioned in your example that you use ISO codes to denote gender in
TEI.  TEI itself, along with all markup languages, metadata schema, etc
are standards unto themselves.  Standards come in many varieties, some
very formal like those approved or commissioned by ISO while others are
less formal, yet sometimes more pervasive.  I wonder what role standards
play in the evolving field of DH and, to try to bring this discussion
round to the general topic of the month, I also wonder what role they play
in the kind of labor we do in academic spaces.  What kind of work do
standards do in humanist spaces and what kind of work do we, as scholars
very generally, do with or around standards in our digital work?

Thank you again for your participation, Julia.  It has been truly
wonderful.

Rhiannon Bettivia
Doctoral Candidate
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign




On 3/21/15, 2:49 PM, "Hamilton, Kevin" <kham at illinois.edu> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>Fantastic! Thanks, Julia for the generous detail. This is indeed the sort
>of discussion I was thinking about in my original mention. Fascinating.
>
>Kevin
>
>On 3/21/15 2:43 PM, "Julia Flanders" <j.flanders at neu.edu> wrote:
>
>>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>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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