Text and its links

One of the things that can be done with a TEI XML texts is transforming it into other formats. E. g. into HTML. (Other thing that can be done is including the text in a collection like CroALa, of course.)

A HTML edition can have links of its own. These links can be encoded in XML, so that they "come alive" after the HTML transformation. What is needed is a good idea what to link to.

There are two natural locations. If a text is a transcription of a source, such as a manuscript, and if the source is present on the internet, we can link to page images. And, if text contains quotations of or allusions to other texts (and the texts are present on the internet), we can link to these texts — or hypotexts, as Gerard Genette would call it.

This isn't quite as simple as it seems. What if hypotext is the Bible, with many books, chapters and verses, and our text refers to a precise location in it? Over the centuries, philology developed special techniques just for such referring actions, and the techniques are migrating to the internet. Slowly, though; perhaps not surprisingly, the Bible — with services such as bib.ly — is again first to apply them.

Linking to images and linking to sources are features of our working editions of Andrija Dudić's (Andreas Dudithius, 1533-1589) Latin translation of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' essay on Thucydides, and of a Latin letter written in 1418 by Juraj Jurjević (Georgius de Georgiis, Zadar c. 1400) to Giovanni Battista Bevilacqua.

Edition of Dudić's text refers to local images taken from the archive.org digital facsimile of a 1586 Frankfurt edition. Edition of Jurjević refers both to images of the manuscript (Munich, BSB, Clm 5350) and to (one) passage in Isaiah. We used a Vulgate edition prepared by the Perseus Project, because Perseus uses stable Citation URIs (as developed by Canonical Text Services) for referring to segments of their texts.

Transforming the TEI XML to HTML required slight modification to their set of XSL stylesheets. Technical information about this (written mostly for myself, as I forget it again and again) is here (on klafil dokuwiki).

Quantification

This morning we had to compile some numbers on the Croatiae auctores Latini collection. Here they are (also on the CroALa developer's blog):

• 143 TEI XML files (including, alas, some duplicates)


• 437.218 words


• 29.637.450 characters


• 16.465,25 Textkarten


• 1029 Druckbogen

Last two strange categories belong to German printing tradition, which was influential in Croatian printing industry; we translated these terms (Textkarte = kartica teksta, Druckbogen = tiskarski arak), and use them still in text accounting.

[Technical note.] Numbers were produced by Linux wc command (cf. recipe) on all XML files currently in CroALa, also available on its Sourceforge page. The Linux one-liner for calculating number of characters and words in multiple XML files was simple:

wc *.xml | awk '{print $3-$1}'

A list of names

Once we start thinking about lists and tinkering with them (and I've been doing this for a long time now), it turns out that another interesting list to compile would be a list of names from a text. Then, if we cross-reference two texts, we can look for names which occur in both.

Here is such a list for names common both to F. de Diversi's description of Dubrovnik (1440), and A. Crijevic Tubero's history of his times (1520). As you'll see, the list is more than just words. Every item is a link to a search in the CroALa collection -- not just to texts by Diversi and Tubero, but to all currently included texts (this could, of course, be fine-tuned).

1. albertI
   
2. albertUs
   
3. alemanUs
   
4. alexandrIE
   
5. andreE
   
6. aUstrIE
   
7. bartholomeo
   
8. blasII
   
9. boemIE
   
10. bosnenses
    
11. carolUs
    
12. chrIstIanorUm
    
13. constantInopolIs
    
14. contareno
    
15. cremonensem
    
16. dalmatIa
    
17. dalmatIE
    
18. epIdaUrI
    
19. epIdaUrII
    
20. epIdaUrUm
    
21. francIscI
    
22. francorUm
    
23. hUngarIE
    
24. IllyrIco
    
25. ItalI
    
26. ItalIcIs
    
27. ItalIco
    
28. IUlII
    
29. lacromE
    
30. laUrentII
    
31. leonardUs
    
32. marIE
    
33. marIam
    
34. martInI
    
35. medIolanI
    
36. mIchEl
    
37. mIchElIs
    
38. neapolI
    
39. neapolItanE
    
40. neapolItanam
    
41. nIcolaI
    
42. nIcolao
    
43. nIcolaUm
    
44. petrI
    
45. petrUm
    
46. posonIo
    
47. rhacUsanE
    
48. rhacUsanIs
    
49. salomonIs
    
50. sIcIlIE
    
51. sIgIsmUndI
    
52. sIgIsmUndo
    
53. sIgIsmUndUm
    
54. thomas
    
55. UngarIE
    

The words look funny because Philologic, the open-source text engine which searches and serves CroALa texts, uses special uppercase characters to find orthographical variants. "UngarIE" will find Vngariae and Ungarię and Ungarie and Vngarye (if there is such a form).