Balisage Paper: Stand-off Bridges in the Frankenstein Variorum Project
Interchange and Interoperability within TEI Markup Ecosystems
Raffaele Viglianti
Research Associate
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
University of Maryland
Abstract
Developing the Frankenstein Variorum Project has necessitated a reconciliation of
extremely divergent markup ecosystems supporting multiple editions of a single
novel. The reconciliation process involves breaking or flattening the original
hierarchies to prioritize units of low-level lateral intersection, points shared in
common to construct bridge
or intermediary formats for processing
with automated collation via CollateX. The output from the automated collation
process also serves as an intermediary format that we transform into a TEI form of
stand-off parallel segmentation, in which
stand-off pointing mechanisms operate like a switchboard for connecting the
individual editions which can remain (for the most part) undisturbed or unmarked
from the collation process. The TEI stand-off bridge
negotiates the
distinct markup ecosystems in ways that can break the silo
effect of
isolating specially encoded editions. Far from an ephemeral support structure, the
stand-off bridge upholds the whole as the spine
of the variorum
project because it improves the interoperability and interchangeability of all the
markup ecosystems involved. Building the stand-off bridge effectively reconstitutes
the hierarchies in a way that expresses intersections essentially as a graph
structure of nodes with edge pointers to comparable nodes.
Our experience on the Frankenstein Variorum is consistent with other TEI projects
that involve the curation of divergence, variance, and forking in text streams.
Taken together, such projects illuminate how the TEI can organize textual data in
ways other than an ordered hierarchy of content objects, and that the TEI can be
turned to express unordered lateral
intersections in ways that serve
long-standing goals of the TEI community: interchangeability and interoperability
of
electronic texts. As Syd Bauman in particular has discussed, where
interchangeability reflects the capacity for humans to negotiate and adapt to markup
ecosystems from systematic navigation and documentation without needing to contact
the encoder for help, interoperability reflects the capacity of software tools to
process the markup without needing to change either it or the tools. Although we
usually consider the needs of software interoperability as at odds with the richly
expressive capacity of human-readable semantic interchange, this paper suggests that
the TEI can be designed to prioritize the interests of both, from facilitating
automated collation to generating an interlinking web interface that gives the user
means to choose and change directions in navigating multiple editions as
desired.