Thomas,
Even if I am an occasional user of CTX (mainly class courses for
beginners and sophomore or by trying to write samples of what it is
possible to achieve with it), and if I think I am aware about what can
do CTX or what it cannot do, I didn't know that you wrote a wiki page
on TEI-XML with ConTeXt : even if I am interested by clever printing and
issues with multi-languages texts topics, I ignored your precious piece
of work. I was interested by the questions of Pr. Jürgen Hanneder,
because even if I don't know a word of Sanskrit, it is allways a true
pain to begin with technical requisits when your real job is to think
about the problematic meaning of ancients or less ancients texts. You
precise clearly what I think about University mores, and J. Hanneder
tell us his problems, which all of us know.
There are, for people who are working on Ancient Greek, Latin, Middle
Age texts or Sanskrit (or whatever) some commercial tools which seem do
the work : but technical efficiency asks allways money. I know of a
company that works for a publisher, whose service is to code some Perl
with text formatted in LaTeX and XML, in order to produce a display on
screen and a printout on paper, until the page which presents the cover
of the book and the summary of the contents, as well as its ISBN code,
its price and the quantity of books in stock.
ConTeXt was at the very start a kind of a clever answer to the huge of
technical abilities asked by LaTeX, and free of charge, numerous people
interested by text editing have turned their eyes to ConTeXt.
I agree with you about reading and solving problems for a 400 pages text
with 2 or 3 different languages and several levels of criticus apparatus
: one needs to begin with the beginning or a kind of beginning with some
issues given by a real and modest sample.
Best//JP
Le 04/01/2022 à 21:02, Thomas A. Schmitz via ntg-context a écrit :
I basically agree with everything you say, Jean-Pierre. Publishers are
modern-day robber barons, and they have been stifling and exploiting scholars
and scholarship for many years now. Behemoths such as Brill, de Gruyter, or
Elsevier are bankrupting libraries in the entire world. However, we scholars
also have some responsibility: if we could agree with each other, we could
easily bypass the big publishers and have our critical editions (in a variety
of formats) on our university’s websites. But we don’t do that: younger
scholars need the validation of big name publications to build reputation and
find a job, older scholars (myself included) are vain and/or old-fashioned and
prefer a “real” book.
For your questions at the end: as you know, TEI is an insanely huge beast.
Nobody will be willing and/or able to implement all of it in ConTeXt. What we
need is actual use cases: scholars coming here and building up the expertise
via the work they’re actually doing. Preferably in smaller installments so the
developers and advanced users can slowly prepare bits and pieces of these
stylesheets. No-one is going to look at a 400-page edition with all kinds of
special needs in one go; we start with a chapter, a few pages, and we make our
way. That’s what I expected when I wrote the wiki page on TEI xml: that it
would slowly develop into something more comprehensive. Alas, it has been
sitting there for 11 years… Every now and then, someone will appear on the
mailing list and say: I need four apparatuses and six parallel translations and
bells and whistles at every paragraph, but when you ask for real examples and
specifications, they ride out into the sunset, never to be heard of again… So:
I’m all for continuing in this direction, but we need some continuity. (And,
not to brag, but still: I even managed to obtain some funding a couple of years
ago to improve the bibliographical support in ConTeXt; if you have a real
project, you can always allocate some funding for these things). As for
learning TEI: I really think this is absolutely inevitable; even if new formats
will be invented in the future (and TEI has serious shortcomings for many sorts
of manuscript traditions), they will probably do so with TEI as a starting
point.
I’m not working on a critical edition right now, but I have done some
preparatory work and am willing to chip in!
All best
Thomas
On 4. Jan 2022, at 18:54, Jean-Pierre Delange via
ntg-context<ntg-context@ntg.nl> wrote:
Thomas,
You are deeply right ! But this is an issue in academic edition, not only
because students read no more at length (specially in humanities), and by
consequence, don't buy books, but among other reasons there is a general
problem in publishing in academic fields, pointed by Jürgen Hanneder : even
Universities libraries don't buy all items published by scholars in a specific
field, but publishers themselves have leveled the academic criterium by
commercial/economic considerations. Then, scholars have to gather financial
funding with technical computing practice, which is another issue, and
furthermore they have to find money in order to publish at expansive cost (see
Brill prices, for example).
You are right about some academic tools, like those developed by Tuft
University (like ancient greek thesaurus :http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/ or The
Liddell-Scott-Jones online dictionary
:http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1), but for providing such tools as
online digital work, there is two ways :
1. Academic courses on TEI XML given to advanced students in order to help them
to produce well achieved projects (and provide manuals to do that; an example
here in French
:http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/XML-TEI/ManuelWeb/Manuel_TEI_BVH.html)
2. Or, there are not so numerous nests like NTG-Context discussion list ! How
to help Jürgen (and scholars generally) who knock at the door looking for an
analysis of their needs and questioning how ConTeXt may help them ?
a) They have to learn TEI XML, then
b) learn Context stylesheet !
Is it possible to gather a group of people interested by these topics ? Are we
starting today ?
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Ancients&Moderns
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