[tei-council] [TEI-DIR-WG] Rotation and Reflection

[Martin Holmes]

Hi Rob,

This is a publicly-archived list, so if that login is sensitive, you 
might want to change it.

Nice XML! It's good to see it available. Not enough sites do that.

Cheers,
Martin

On 12-12-14 06:10 PM, Robert Whalen wrote:
> Perhaps the best way for everyone to see the "Easter Wings" example is
> to go to the following site, complements of UVaP using the temporary
> username/password herbert1633 (same for both):
>
> http://digitaltemple.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu
>
> Go to parallel display and find Easter Wings using one of the drop
> downs. The rest is pretty intuitive. Note the link to the TEI-XML.
>
> Cheers,
> Rob
>
> On 12/14/12 12:12 PM, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 12-12-14 02:17 AM, Rob Whalen wrote:
>>> On Dec 13, 2012, at 4:29 PM, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'd like to bring in Robert and Stella here. Robert, does it seem
>>>> to you that what's happening in Easter Wings is something very
>>>> different from what's happening when Japanese is written (as it
>>>> normally is, in a lot of contexts) from top-to-bottom, left to
>>>> right?
>>>
>>> Clearly what's happening in ewings is entirely different. From a
>>> writing or reading perspective, it's not an instance of t to b and l
>>> to r but rather a block of text rotated clockwise 90 degrees. The
>>> question for me is how best to capture this in a TEI-XML
>>> transcription so as NOT semantically to suggest a t to b reading
>>> orientation, and to render the rotated block in the display. An added
>>> wrinkle, as concerns the encoded transcription, is that of the three
>>> witnesses to the poem (encoded using TEI parallel segmentation), only
>>> one is rotated. I'd like to preserve the line by line parallel
>>> encoding while capturing the rotated orientation of the one witness
>>> and writing XSL and CSS to handle it effectively.
>>
>> This is an interesting wrinkle that I hadn't really thought about, but
>> now you raise it, it's obvious: whatever we choose to do to represent
>> both text directionality and rotational phenomena must be expressible
>> in ways which make it easy to connect it with specific witnesses or
>> readings. Your encoding should be one of our test cases here.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>>
>>>> Stella, are there any instances in which Arabic might be written
>>>> vertically? I don't recall seeing anything like that, but with shop
>>>> signs etc. I guess it might happen. If it does happen, what is the
>>>> effect on the shapes of glyphs? IIRC the shape of a glyph in Arabic
>>>> is dependent on context, and enables the clean joining of glyph
>>>> sequences.
>>>>
>>>> It occurs to me that one of our test cases for encoding complex
>>>> rotational phenomena might be a captcha image; these often show
>>>> letters partially rotated, and sometimes skewed in ways which mimic
>>>> 3D rotation.
>>>>
>>>> Which brings me to a more general point: I'd like to start
>>>> gathering a set of small but interesting test cases -- real
>>>> documents, as short as we can find them, which cover all the
>>>> phenomena we need to deal with. Easter Wings is one. It would be
>>>> great to get examples of all the Japanese variants, Greek written
>>>> right-to-left (I didn't even know that happened until recently),
>>>> and English written vertically with letters both upright and not.
>>>> If you have examples of texts that would be useful, especially if
>>>> you have a page-image, and _especially_ if there are no
>>>> restrictions on use of same so we could actually consider putting
>>>> it in the Guidelines, please send them along.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers, Martin
>>>>
>>>> On 12-12-13 12:31 PM, Marcus Bingenheimer wrote:
>>>>> Hi Martin,
>>>>>
>>>>> I like the logic of replacing reflection with rotation. Apart
>>>>> from Ockham's razor it opens up new games like: What is this: ".
>>>>> ._ _ _  _ _ _"" (answer: Non-serif "I love you" rotated 90 deg on
>>>>> the x-axis). We should default the value for x and y rotation to
>>>>> 180 deg, however, as most writing happens in 2D and the
>>>>> introduction of 3D opens a can of worms. We do not want people to
>>>>> think that we want to describe character "thinkness" or the
>>>>> spherical qualities of an "o" ring with TEI. To say nothing of 4D
>>>>> animations, let's leave that to TEI P8.
>>>>>
>>>>> I also like the idea of distinguishing between "rotational
>>>>> effects" and "directionality". One can indeed argue that some
>>>>> directions are merely a secondary effect introduced by a
>>>>> typesetter or an artist, and that writing system have a innate
>>>>> direction (or two equally valid ones as in Ch or Jp). For
>>>>> instance, the Mongolian word in the Unicode example (Sec.3.3) is
>>>>> not "actually" written that way, I would say that it is written
>>>>> top-to-bottom and then rotated counter-clockwise 90deg.
>>>>>
>>>>> all the best
>>>>>
>>>>> marcus
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> -- Dr. Marcus Bingenheimer 馬德偉 Department of Religion, Temple
>>>>> University http://mbingenheimer.net
>>>>
>>>> -- Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and
>>>> Media Centre (mholmes at uvic.ca)
>>
>
> --
>
> Robert Whalen, PhD
>
> Professor, Department of English
>
> Northern Michigan University
>
> 1401 Presque Isle Avenue
>
> Marquette, MI 49855
>
> 906-227-2678
>
> Office hours: Monday and Wednesday, 8:10-9:50 and 4:40-5:30
>
> rwhalen at nmu.edu <mailto:rwhalen at nmu.edu>
>
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> <http://myweb.nmu.edu/%7Erwhalen/home.htm>
>
> /The truth will set you free. But not until it’s finished with you./
>
> - David Foster Wallace
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
mholmes at uvic.ca
UVic Humanities Computing and Media Centre