In today's class we looked at how TEI/XML relates to interface, with our examples coming from digital scholarly editions much like the William Blake Archive, which Kirschenbaum discusses in one of our two required readings for the week.
One example is Folger Digital Texts, whose Shakespeare editions are available in readable form, as downloadable XML files, and via a prototype API which you'll find linked in the upper right of the screen. One API function that we looked at in class is the "character chart" for Hamlet, which you can see in a screenshot below. Characters in the play are listed in the leftmost column, and their appearances on stage are shown on the horizontal axis, with thick and thin red lines demarcating act and scene divisions. Within those horizontal lines, the black segments indicate lines spoken, while the grey segments indicate a character onstage but not speaking. The same is true for the green, which indicates dead characters, whether ghosts or simply characters who have died and remain on stage (like several characters at the end). What worth keeping in mind is that this chart, like all of the outputs of the different API functions, is derived from the same XML that's used to bring the reading texts to the screen.
The other digital edition we looked at is the Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare, which is described in more detail here. Like Folger Digital Texts, this project makes its source XML available with a fair amount of documentation in the form of a digital challenge to designers to use the XML to create new interfaces and applications.
We also looked at typographic markup on the first page of Genesis in the 1611 King James Bible. You can view a digital facsimile of the complete book here. If you'd like to read more about the typographic design of the book, see the David Norton reading linked under "recommended readings" for this week.
On the topic of typography as markup, we also touched briefly on the history and different meanings of quotation marks. You can read about their history at another online project I'm invovled with, called Architectures of the Book.
Not many lecture slides this week, but they're posted in the usual place on BB and embedded below:
We're down two runs in Game 3 of the Jays-Cleveland series as I post this (and Cecil's just gone in as reliever), but for what it's worth, here's some great book-spine baseball poetry for Cleveland courtesy of the Toronto Public Library:
