Tei Notes
Towards a TEI for Folklore Studies
Most of the information below can be found in Chapter 8 of the P5 Guidelines. What I am highlighting here are the particulars that will go into the TEI documents I am creating of the local legends which form the basis of my current explorations in computational modeling of narrative.
Every TEI has a TEIheader and a text, the basic TEI for spoken texts is no different and would look like this:
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<!DOCTYPE TEI.2 system 'tei2.dtd'>
<teiHeader>
<!-- Metadata goes here. -->
</teiHeader>
<text>
<!-- Text goes here. -->
</text>
</TEI>
About the TEIheader, the guidelines note the following:
Each such unit has associated with it a teiHeader providing detailed contextual information such as the source of the transcript, the identity of the participants, whether the speech is scripted or spontaneous, the physical and social setting in which the discourse takes place and a range of other aspects.
About the text, the guidelines for spoken discourse assume that the text:
- is internally cohesive,
- is describable by a single header, and
- represents a single stretch of time with no significant discontinuities.
Since we are dealing with a special kind of text, a spoken text, we will mostly be working within utterances, tagged <u>. The guidelines note that utterances can also contain the following:
- pauses
- vocalized but non-lexical phenomena such as coughs
- kinesic (non-verbal, non-lexical) phenomena such as gestures
- entirely non-linguistic incidents occurring during and possibly influencing the course of speech
- shifts or changes in vocal quality
This list was shortened to limit its relevance to folkloristic concerns.
Constructing the TEIheader
Okay, so those are the possibilities. What are the details which we should place inside the header, and how should they be organized vis-a-vis other parts of the document or other documents? That is, how much metadata do we keep with the data and how much do we place somewhere else but make available through a link?
TEI embeds all this information inside the header as a source description. Folklorists are, for the most part, going to be documenting discourse and events via audio or video recordings, and so we will want to write a recording statement within which we declare the nature of the recording itself as well as provide basic information about who and what was recorded.
Together, with the recording statement enclosed within the source description, this part of the header might look like this:
<sourceDesc>
<recordingStmt>
<recording type="video">
<p>U-matic recording made by college audio-visual department staff,
available as PAL-standard VHS transfer or sound-only cassette</p>
</recording>
</recordingStmt>
<recordingStmt>
<recording type="audio" dur="P30M">
<respStmt>
<resp>Location recording by</resp>
<name>Sound Services Ltd.</name>
</respStmt>
<equipment>
<p>Multiple close microphones mixed down to stereo Digital
Audio Tape, standard play, 44.1 KHz sampling frequency</p>
</equipment>
<date>12 Jan 1987</date>
</recording>
</recordingStmt>
<recordingStmt>
<recording type="audio" dur="P15M" xml:id="rec-3001">
<date>14 Feb 2001</date>
</recording>
<recording type="audio" dur="P15M" xml:id="rec-3002">
<date>17 Feb 2001</date>
</recording>
<recording type="audio" dur="P15M" xml:id="rec-3003">
<date>22 Feb 2001</date>
</recording>
</recordingStmt>
</sourceDesc>