Re-engineering a war-machine : ARTFL's encyclopédie

Current circumstances, specifically (i) competition from commercial developers and (ii) the need for compatibility between disparate data sources, suggest that it is crucially important to reconsider the ways in which the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) are applied to computing projects in the humanities. Based on our work with Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, we contend that, in many cases, light, automatically generated tagging is preferable to extensive manual mark-up. The massive size and complex textual structures of this work made it imperative to devise procedures that would eliminate the need for hand editing. Data capture for this project was limited to clear typographic conventions, using HTML conventions and simplified SGML-style tags. All identification of textual units (such as articles and cross-references) and textual attributes (such as authorship and subject headings) was then carried out automatically. The resulting hierarchical units (articles, words, paragraphs) can be queried in diverse ways using systems developed by the ARTFL Project. These systems provide full-text retrieval and full-text searching, either in the full text or in a sub-corpus defined by the user. The proven viability of these procedures leads us to assert that this model could be applied profitably to a much wider range of projects where cost-effectiveness and flexibility are desirable.