The German Poetry of Paul Fleming

This study reassesses the poetry of Paul Fleming (1609–1640) in the context of its own literary, historical, and social background. The four chapters focus initially on generic and historical context. The study of selected texts leads to more general considerations of the sources and significance of certain major themes. A number of poems by Fleming and poets contemporary with him uncovered in the twentieth century are evaluated here for the first time. The result is a substantially revised view of Fleming's poetic development. Fleming is shown to have been a more complex and wide-ranging poet than was conventionally thought, one whose debt to Renaissance literary traditions has been underestimated

Document similarity

In recent years, development of tools and methods for measuring document similarity has become a thriving field in informatics, computer science, and digital humanities. Historically, questions of document similarity have been (and still are) important or even crucial in a large variety of situations. Typically, similarity is judged by criteria which depend on context. The move from traditional to digital text technology has not only provided new possibilities for discovery and measurement of document similarity, it has also posed new challenges. Some of these challenges are technical, others conceptual. This paper argues that a particular, well-established, traditional way of starting with an arbitrary document and constructing a document similar to it, namely transcription, may fruitfully be brought to bear on questions concerning similarity criteria for digital documents. Some simple similarity measures are presented and their application to marked up documents are discussed. We conclude that when documents are encoded in the same vocabulary, n-grams constructed to include markup can be used to recognize structural similarities between documents.publishedVersio

A Vision for User-Defined Semantic Markup

Typesetting systems, such as LaTeX, permit users to define custom markup and corresponding formatting to simplify authoring, ensure the consistent presentation of domain-specific recurring elements and, potentially, enable further processing, such as the generation of an index of such elements. In XML-based and similar systems, the separation of content and form is also reflected in the processing pipeline: while document authors can define custom markup, they cannot define its semantics. This could be said to be intentional to ensure structural integrity of documents, but at the same time it limits the expressivity of markup. The latter is particularly true for so-called lightweight markup languages like Markdown, which only define very limited sets of generic elements. This vision paper sketches an approach for user-defined semantic markup that could permit authors to define the semantics of elements by formally describing the relations between its constituent parts and to other elements, and to define a formatting intent that would ensure that a default presentation is always available

The Text Encoding Initiative: Electronic text markup for research

This paper describes the goals and work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research purposes. It begins by outlining some basic problems that arise in the attempt to represent textual material in computers and some problems that arise in the attempt to encourage the sharing and reuse of electronic textual resources. These problems provide the necessary background for a brief review of the origins and organization of the Text Encoding Initiative itself. Next, the paper describes the rationale for the decision of the TEI to use the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) as the basis for its work. Finally, the work accomplished by the TEI is described in general terms, and some attempt is made to clarify what the project has and has not accomplished.published or submitted for publicatio

A TEI P5 Document Grammar for the IDS Text Model

This paper describes work in progress on I5, a TEI-based document grammar for the corpus holdings of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim and the text model used by IDS in its work. The paper begins with background information on the nature and purposes of the corpora collected at IDS and the motivation for the I5 project (section 1). It continues with a description of the origin and history of the IDS text model (section 2), and a description (section 3) of the techniques used to automate, as far as possible, the preparation of the ODD file documenting the IDS text model. It ends with some concluding remarks (section 4). A survey of the additional features of the IDS-XCES realization of the IDS text model is given in an appendix

Drawing inferences on the basis of markup

Various authors have sketched out proposals for identifying the meaning, or guiding the automated interpretation, of markup, sometimes with the goal of using the information expressed by markup to guide the extraction of information from documents and using it to populate reasoning engines. We describe one approach to the problems of building a system to perform such a task.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe