How to cite this paper

Renear, Allen H., and Steven J. DeRose. “Markup Category Terminology over the Years: a First Look.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2022, Washington, DC, August 1 - 5, 2022. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2022. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 27 (2022). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol27.Renear01.

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2022
August 1 - 5, 2022

Balisage Paper: Markup Category Terminology over the Years: a First Look

Allen H. Renear

School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Allen Renear is a faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He served as dean of the School from 2012 to 2019 and is currently in the Office of the Provost as a Special Advisor for Strategic Initiatives. Prior to coming to Illinois, he was Director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. Renear was an Observer at X3V1.TG8 during the finalization of ISO8879 and has never recovered. He has served on several early TEI committees, was the American Philosophical Association’s delegate on the first TEI Advisory Board, was involved in various roles in the Brown University (now Northeastern University) Womens Writers Project, and was the first Chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group (OEBPS, now ePUB/IDPF). He has been coming to Balisage (and its predecessors) for longer than he can remember. His academic specialties are data curation, scientific communication, and the conceptual foundations of information systems.

Steven J. DeRose

Independent Consultant

Steve DeRose is a computational linguist who works mainly in document structured document systems, NLP, and hypertext. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies in 1989 to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, DynaText, and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, HyTime, and others. He has served as adjunct faculty in Computer Science at Brown University and Calvin University, and written many papers and patents, and two books. He is presently Head of Linguistics at Docugami, a Seattle-based startup solving business document problems using AI.

Abstract

We’ve been doing the markup thing for more than half a century, since the beginnings of computerized text processing. In that time we’ve put a lot of adjectives in front of markup that reflect how we think of and apply the markup. These qualifiers have tended to fall into two categories, those that suggest what will happen, particularly in presentation, as a result of the application of markup to a string of data and those that reflect what we think about the data itself. Beginning with broad terms, like generic we have made many attempts to elucidate what our our markup is intended to accomplish: conceptual, declarative, logical, structural, and semantic have all had their times in the spotlight. What do the changing fashions in terminology say about our data and about what we, the practitioners, think about our work?