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  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
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  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Examples
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Tests
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Exercises
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Tools
  • 1. TEI validator
  • 2. XML toolkit
• About

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5. Metaphorical Language #

Just like any other aspect of the transcription and encoding process, analysing metaphorical language involves interpretation. Unlike the expression of this interpretation in structural markup, the analysis of metaphorical language addresses logical structures that probably will cross structural boundaries. Due to the primary focus of the TEI encoding scheme on representing structural characteristics of texts, and the syntactic requirement that all XML structures should nest properly, this kind of logical analysis will need a kind of workaround. One such workaround defines different analytic categories separately and links them to the relevant passages in the poems. A first requirement is that the smallest addressable structures be identified with an @xml:id attribute:

These @xml:id values can later be used to identify spans of interpretive categories. Such interpretive spans are encoded as <span>, identifying the structural scope of this interpretation with the @from attribute marking its beginning and the @to attribute marking its end. Their values are values for an @xml:id attribute elsewhere in the document, prefixed with a hash character (#), in order to indicate it as the identifier part of a formal URI reference. Preferably, the @resp attribute is used to identify who is responsible for the interpretation.

Related <span> elements can be grouped in a <spanGrp> element. A @type attribute can characterise the kind of analysis. In our poem, one way of identifying all images concerned with food and non-food could be:

Notice that the @from attribute is mandatory on <span>. The @to attribute is optional; when it is missing, the entire structure identified by the @from attribute will be taken as the context for the interpretation.

As will be clear from this example, this system of linking analyses to textual structures is not very economic when discontinuous structures share the same analysis. Another approach for logical analysis works from the opposite angle, by hooking text structures to specific interpretations. In order to do so, interpretive categories should be formally defined somewhere else, either in the same document or externally. This is done inside the <interp> element, bearing a unique @xml:id attribute. Related interpretive categories can be grouped inside an <interpGrp> element. Following example could identify the same semantic categories from the previous example:

Inside the transcription of the poem, reference can be made to these interpretations with an @ana attribute. Its value should always point to an identifier, either locally or externally. Suppose these interpretive categories are stored in a separate document named analysis.xml. Then the poem could be analysed as follows: