Topics to search for in the Decameron

[setriplette]

This is Dr. Triplette. When you're distant reading the Decameron, read a story or two and then use the terms you learn from that story to search for the kinds of things that recur:

1. Character names (e.g. Fiammetta, Dioneo, Filomena--the narrators)
2. City and country names (e.g. Genoa, Florence, Alexandria, France, etc)
3. body parts--heart comes to mind, but try others too
4. ships and ship vocabulary. This will tell you which stories move around the mediterranean.
5. other significant objects--pick them out of one story (coin, ruby, dagger, shift, wine etc) and see if they show up in other stories
6. professions--I know you'll get hits on merchant and priest, but can you think of others? What about the word wife? (or other words indicating social status).

[laurenmcguigan]

@setriplette That's a great idea! @ebeshero when we tag these, can we just make the literal version of what it is an element? For example <bodyPart> </bodyPart> or <object> </object>

[ebeshero]

@laurenmcguigan Well, you could do that if this were generic XML, but you can't do it in TEI because it has restricted list of elements. What you'll want to do is come up with a good list of elements to use for these things that are legit with the TEI, and for that you'll want to do a little research in the TEI Guidelines. The only way to do this is just by reading chapters and looking at examples, and then enlightening the project team! That is a good thing to put one of you in charge of, and if you'd like to try it, I think it would be a good experience for you. This by itself should take a little research and careful thinking.

Here's a workflow:

• [ ] Read the TEI Guidelines Chapter 13 on Names, Dates, People, and Places and take notes on possible elements and attributes to use. (I call this "going shopping for elements and attributes.")
• [ ] Write it up on a special GitHub Issues page here on the Decameron project and ping your project team and me!
• [ ] We all need to talk it over and make sure the tags make sense to everyone!
• [ ] Once you all agree, one of you writes this up on a wiki in this repository as your agreed-upon list of TEI elements for use with names of particular kinds of things in the project. For example, here's the wiki "codebook" for Becca's City Slave Girls project: https://github.com/RJP43/CitySlaveGirls/wiki/Checkout-our-Codebook!

I can show you some of the decisions we've made in my projects, but I think it's best for one of you to start by reading the TEI Guidelines and being familiar with their recommendations--because they're written to help guide you in times like these!

@laurenmcguigan @jlm323 @mjb232 : I'm pinging the rest of you because if one of you is on assignment to research TEI element names, that's a legitimate task by itself for the Midterm exam. Should Lauren be the one to research this and prepare a list of elements to use for the group?

For simple things like people and places, the TEI elements <persName> and <placeName> are pretty easy starting points to get you rolling with markup. The other kinds of names here will require a different strategy with the TEI, and one of you should be researching this!

[ebeshero]

That said, a very simple starting strategy is to separate persName, placeName, and all other kinds of names. TEI has a generic <name> element and you could set an @type and an @subtype attribute on it, for example. As you're hunting through the TEI Guidelines, you want to look for simple generic solutions like that. In TEI, we typically use attribute values to distinguish different kinds of things. And you need to plot out a sort of taxonomy of interesting things to search for. As you work this out, you want to record it here on GitHub so you all have a standard set way to tag things the same way across the project. That's the challenge of the teamwork part of this! You can do it, but you have to plan ahead!

I would say, if any of you on the team are particularly interested in the TEI, you might want to volunteer for this research task. TEI is built in as a unit with its own homework assignments in the XML part of the class next fall, and if you're all starting something in TEI for next fall's students to continue if they wish, those of you thinking of continuing next fall would be in a great position to do a little research work now.

[laurenmcguigan]

Just beginning to read through this, we could do something like: <category xml:id=""/> and have the xml:id's for each category listed in a type of "objectography". So, we could have categories like ship names and vocabulary and tag each of those with <category xml:id="shipVocab"> Boat </category>