TEI 2019

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An Attempt of Dissemination of TEI in a TEI-underdeveloped country: Activities of the SIG EAJ

Satoru Nakamura, Kazuhiro Okada, Kiyonori Nagasaki

Keywords: SIG, Japan, Aozora Bunko, Dissemination
Permalink: https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:tei2019.156

One of the missions of Special Interest Group for East Asian/Japanese (hereinafter SIG EAJ) is the dissemination of TEI in Japan. A characteristic of Japan in comparison with TEI-advanced countries in North America and Europe is that the culture which utilizes XML-related technologies such as XSLT and XQuery have not been widespread. In this paper, we discuss how to spread TEI in such TEI-underdeveloped countries based on the activities of SIG EAJ.

One of the missions of Special Interest Group for East Asian/Japanese (hereinafter SIG EAJ) is the dissemination of TEI in Japan. A characteristic of Japan in comparison with TEI-advanced countries in North America and Europe is that the culture which utilizes XML-related technologies such as XSLT and XQuery have not been widespread. In addition, methodologies of research for textuality have not widely been treated among humanities researchers in Japan. In this paper, we discuss how to spread TEI in such TEI-underdeveloped countries based on the activities of SIG EAJ.

One of our activities is the hands-on sessions which handle Aozora Bunko texts. Aozora Bunko transcribes public domain works like Project Gutenberg, and about 20,000 texts are available in its original format and HTML. This hands-on session aims to provide not only the opportunities to learn TEI by the converting practice but also the TEI-compliant Japanese texts on the Web. We are also preparing a comprehensive set of tutorials for Japanese resources using GitHub. Sections such as how to write the TEI header, how to encode plays have been created so far. Through these sessions, more than 20 texts were encoded in conformance with Level 3 of Best Practice for TEI in Libraries. In addition, we are developing visualization tools using JavaScript such as CETEIcean, and the program which automatically converts Aozora Bunko texts into TEI in the Level 2 of the practice.

By coupling with compiling tutorials and accumulating markup examples targeting Aozora Bunko texts, we have gained in-depth knowledge of markup on modern Japanese texts. Through this activity, the number of people who are familiar with TEI is getting increased. Moreover, in countries where XML-related technologies have not been widespread such as Japan, JavaScript tools can work well to share the benefits of TEI. This point is considered to be helpful in the spread of TEI in other TEI-underdeveloped countries.

Bibliography

Text Encoding Initiative (2019). TEI: East Asian/Japanese SIG https://tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/EastAsian/ .

青空文庫 (2019). 青空文庫 Aozora Bunko https://www.aozora.gr.jp/ .

TEI: East Asian/Japanese SIG (2019). GitHub repository for TEI: East Asian/Japanese SIG https://github.com/TEI-EAJ .

TEIC (2019). TEI in HTML5 Custom Elements https://github.com/TEIC/CETEIcean .