Using standoff properties for marking-up historical documents in the humanities

• Published in: Information technology (Munich, Germany) Vol. 58; no. 2; pp. 63 - 69
• Main Author: Schmidt, Desmond Allan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter Oldenbourg 01.03.2016
• Subjects: Applied computing→Document management and text processing→Document management→Text Editing; historical text editing; Information systems→World Wide Web→Web data description languages→Markup languages; overlapping hierarchies; Standoff markup
• ISSN: 1611-2776; 2196-7032; 2196-7032
• DOI: 10.1515/itit-2015-0030

Markup in the form of tags is often embedded into documents to describe formatting structures and other features, as in HTML on the Web. But in the humanities, the use of embedded markup for the transcription of historical documents leads to problems in the representation of overlapping features, and subjective variation in the use of different markup tags for the same features compromises interoperability of the transcriptions. “Standoff” techniques, in which the markup and the text it describes are stored separately, can help alleviate these problems. “Standoff properties” is a technique for recording textual properties that do not conform to a context-free grammar, and can freely overlap. This allows a divide-and-conquer approach to markup, whereby sets of markup properties can record different aspects of a text, which can then be recombined as needed. Despite these advantages, standoff techniques are usually considered impractical when both the underlying text and its markup are subject to change. To circumvent this problem, this paper describes a practical algorithm for updating a set of standoff markup properties separately from the text.