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

Mon Dec 17 12:59:54 EST 2012

No harm, as Rob's Digital Temple just launched and will be open-access for the 
next two weeks anyway.

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Martin Holmes wrote:

> Sorry, sent this to the wrong list. Especially ironic, given the content...
>
> On 12-12-14 10:51 PM, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> 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:
>
>>> 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>
>>>
>>> http://myweb.nmu.edu/~rwhalen/home.htm
>>> <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
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>
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