No source: created in electronic format.
The École nationale des chartes publishes a variety of
electronic corpora,Diple is a collection of tools to organize modular
production, publication, and searching of electronic corpora.
The TEI guidelines (500 XML elements, 1500 pages of documentation) allow endless
variations in encoding, even for identical objects. For example, italic in our corpora has been encoded with different
combinations of <(hi|emph)
rend="(italique|italic|ital.|i|itlaic|...)">. After several years
of development, with different encoders, each electronic edition becomes an
independent software, with its own encoding, mistakes, workarounds, with also
different technologies for publication or fulltext searching.
Diple starts with housekeeping. First, for all our tagged
texts, we wrote a precise document type definition (in
Relax-NG syntax) in order to define three main and shared schemas :
The normalization of the corpora is a more sustainable investment than new
software. These shared schemas are extremely helpful for normalizing and
validating XML instances, and therefore allow us to take advantage of earlier
TEI editions. Of course, the Diple TEI schema is modular,
allowing customization for each editorial project.
Moreover, this work of normalization of our XML corpora is a small price to pay
to factorize our code, for instance to create a standard XSLT engine: the screen
transformation of a new corpus conforming to those schemas is done by this
engine, increasing our publication productivity. In the end, the XSLT of a
specific edition is short, focusing on the very specific aspects of the corpus
(its custom schema) related to a research project, the main part of the
publication job being done by the Diple XSLT engine. The
same logic applied for presentation CSS.
A publication system usually allows templating and plugins. A good software
architecture should be conceived in this way, but scholarly editions don't
function like a CMS. Templating systems are usually designed to effect easy
change of colours, to deliver the same feature under different designs. In a
scholarly collection, books could share a cover, but follow very different
structures. Rather than constrain all corpora to a single template, the Diple system provides different components, allowing an
electronic corpus editor to compose the interface best suited to his text.
Headers or footers are easy to share, but beyond that, one project might require
a fulltext search box, another a database query, another a sidebar table of
contents. Design snippets or plugins are conceived of as portal bricks, easy to
compose in a server page (PHP), and are kept as simple and light as possible. If
a local variable, function or object could have a general interest, it should be
shared.
Navigation, tables and indexes, should answer most of the user's needs; but a
search box is also an important navigation tool. Diple
ensures a canonical electronic publication, with persistent addresses, so that
different text engines can be plugged around the edition. Corpora may require
different approaches. A collection of items, like a dictionary or cartularies,
needs at first a retrieving engine to get an item conveniently, by a keyword in
full-text, but also dates, headwords and other metadatas. There are also texts
for which no divisions are relevant; a concordance report is much more
informative, displaying all occurrences in context. Different tools offer
different views, documented XML allows us to generate what an engine likes. We
have successfully used MySQL full-text indexes
Diple grows and adapts with each new corpus, rapidly
incorporating other corpora, an idea worth generalizing. All our code will soon
be released under a free software license. Anyone can download, read, and try
Diple. We don’t claim it will work for all your TEI
documents, but if they conform to the schemas, you will quickly get nice results
on the screen.