Module 8: Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
1. jTEI: a Customisation for Journal Articles #
This examples provides some snippets of the jTEI customisation ODD file, which defines a minimalist TEI scheme for encoding journal articles. This customisation is being used for encoding the source files of the articles of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. This “clean” customisation defines a trimmed-down model of TEI texts, making it easier to enforce a consistent encoding style. This way, authors and editors are offered guidance in the composition and editing of an article. Inside the <schemaSpec> section of this "tei_jtei" customisation, you’ll see that only a limited number of elements is included from the core, corpus, figures, header, namesdates, tagdocs, tei, textstructure, and transcr TEI modules.
In this example, the definition of the <figure> element is made more stringent, in order to enforce a very specific structure on its contents. This is done inside an <elementSpec> element with a value of "figure" for the @ident attribute; the @mode attribute indicates that the existing element element specification should be changed. The contents for the <figure> element are being redefined in a <content> element, which is specifying a very strict sequence of either a single <graphic>, <egXML>, or <eg> element, which must be followed by one or more <head> elements. Notice how the <elementRef> elements are being used to refer to these different TEI elements, and the <sequence> and <alternate> elements are being used to specify how they are combined. With the @minOccurs and @maxOccurs attributes on the <elementRef> reference to the <head> element, it is stipulated that at least 1 <head> element must be present, without an upper bound. The <attList> section is used to remove the attributes @place and @title from <figure>.
Likewise, the specification of the <titleStmt> element is re(de)fined, in that its <content> is reduced to a sequence of one or more <title> elements, followed by one or more <author> elements. Notice that the order is important here: there’s no <alternate> wrapper here, that would allow alternation of these elements. Notice, too, how this <elementSpec> element contains additional modifications: a <constraintSpec> element is used to define additional Schematron checks that can express context-dependent validation rules. In this case, a rule is defined which ensures that at least one <title> element must be present in <titleStmt>, with a value "main" for its @type attribute. For more information on the definition of such Schematron constraints in ODD: see section 22.5.2 Additional Constraints of the TEI Guidelines.
2. Abolishing Numbered Text Divisions #
Following ODD file defines a minimal TEI schema (containing the core, tei, header, and textstructure modules). Besides that, it does away with numbered text divisions (<div1>, ..., <div7>) by specifying the value "delete" for the @mode attribute on their respective <elementSpec> declarations.
Notice that strictly speaking, only deletion of <div1> is necessary, as all further numbered subdivisions should nest according to the TEI scheme. By definition, if the topmost level is deleted, all further subdivisions are practically excluded from the document model. Although they are still declared, they can’t be used in documents according to this schema. Additionally, notice how this list of separate <elementSpec> instructions could be expressed more concisely as:
Bibliography
- Van den Branden, Ron and Martin Holmes. 2014. “Journal of the Text-Encoding Initiative Article Schema. Schema and guidelines for encoding an article for the journal.” https://tei-c.org/guidelines/customization/jtei/.