At a first glance, there is nothing particularly
unique about the Oxford Text Archive (OTA).
It’s a digital library with a collection that primarily consists of digitized,
English language humanities documents and manuscripts such as the works of Shakespeare or the collected
poems of Milton. There’s nothing available in their catalogue which
couldn’t be found on other, much more popular electronic resources such as the Internet
Archive or Project
Gutenberg. These items are accessible to the user in Plain Text, Epub, and
Modi (Kindle) formats so as to be flexible with the different devices from
which they will be read.
The
difference is that, partly because of their cooperation with the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI), the OTA also makes available their collections in their
skeletal, XML formats. For many, this addition would not mean a great deal.
They are likely only interested in the content of the text itself and not particularly
interested with the process which brought it from the manuscript in a
temperature-controlled library room to the much more accessible form now available
to them on their laptop, tablet or phone.
But
allowing this access is provides the student and researchers the opportunity to
scrutinize these texts more objectively. Even the best digitisations of classic
texts are reliant on the work of those who are using markup in the same way
that an English version of Plato is reliant on a translator. Both workers are
concerned with communicating the idiosyncrasies of the work to those who are
not fluent with the language and form of how it was created. Making the markup
available allows the researcher to discern whether or not the decisions made by
the OTA encoders are in agreement with their interpretation of the text and
even to challenge their own notions because of the tags chosen by the institution.
The
OTA’s website indicates the principles which they adhere to when regarding
their use of XML, but not in any significant detail. They make no attempt to clarify
whether or not they find descriptive or presentational markup to be more
suitable to their needs. All they indicate is that they adhere to the TEI
guidelines for markup. They do not provide any summary for what those
guidelines are, assuming the user will either be already familiar with them or
are perfectly capable of looking them up for themselves.
The
OTA allowing their users to view the markup of their texts provides them with
the opportunity to see the decisions they made when marking up the text. This way,
they can be more critical of the text and not have to passively accept another
scholar’s decisions regarding the markup. They can see the decisions themselves
and decide whether or not this was the most useful way to communicate the
content with hypertext.
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