Paper

The expediency of markup.

Abstract

The TEI has attained a major achievement in digital humanities. Its influence has been thorough and pervasive in humanities computing theory and practice. It can be observed, though, that the chief effort of the TEI community so far has been directed to the production of TEI encoded data, whereas less attention has been payed to their reuse in processing applications. Can the challenge be faced? Where do the difficulties reside? Analytic markup solutions on the one hand and semantic representations of sorts, such as those promoted in the framework of the Semantic Web Activity on the other, are apparently developing in rather unrelated ways. A crucial problem for the TEI community is therefore that of finding systematic ways to relate markup structures one the one side to object domain semantic structures on the other. A first step in this direction can be offered by an engaging discussion on a model of digital text representation comprising both the syntactic and the semantic dimensions.

Biography

Dino Buzzetti is an historian of philosophy and teaches Medieval philosophy at the University of Bologna. Some years ago he participated in a research project on the teaching of logic in Bologna in the 14th century and the direct study of manuscript textual traditions led him to face the problem of editing medieval texts in digital form. At the same time he began giving courses on the digital representation of historical documents at the newly constituted faculty of the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage in Ravenna and was involved with the activities of the first TEI committee on the encoding of manuscript sources. Digital text representation and digital editorial practices have been since his main concern in the field of digital humanities and he now teaches a course on humanities computing to philosophy students in Bologna.

Since 2006 he serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Among his publications, 'Digital Representation and the Text Model,' in New Literary History (2002) and, with Jerome McGann, 'Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon,' in the MLA book, Electronic Textual Editing (2006).

Homepage: http://antonietta.philo.unibo.it