Oxford HCU Lecture Series: Text, Electronic Texts, and the Theory of Markup
From owner-tei-l@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Wed Jun 24 11:40:39 1998
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 11:29:31 -0500 (CDT)
From: Stuart Lee <stuart.lee@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Oxford HCU Lecture Series: Text, Electronic Texts, and the
Theory of Mark-Up
Sender: "TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list"
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Lecture Series, Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University Computing
Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN
At the Humanities Computing Unit we are greatly honoured to have Dr.
Allen Renear from Brown University visiting for the summer.
Dr. Renear is offering a series of three lectures on his work with
electronic texts and the theory of mark-up. All welcome! For more
information on Dr. Renear, see
http://www.stg.brown.edu/stg/staff_pages/allen.html
Lecture Series:
Lecture 1: Text Ontology from Below:
The Contribution of Computing Practice to New Theories of Textuality
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Wednesday 29th July
Lecture 2: Towards a New Theory of Markup
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Thursday 30th July
Lecture 3: The Revised Standard Theory of "What Text Really Is"
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Wednesday 5th August
Stuart Lee
Head of the Centre for Humanities Computing
Lecture 1: Text Ontology from Below:
The Contribution of Computing Practice to New Theories of Textuality
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Wednesday 29th July
The practice of computer text encoding has turned out to be
astonishingly effective at generating insights into the nature of
textuality. In particular, over the last decade reflective
practitioners of electronic publishing and computer text encoding have
developed in succession three very powerful general theories which,
perhaps not surprisingly, recapitulate three fundamental metaphysical
attitudes towards the world in general: realism, pluralism, and
antirealism. Although these theories have deep connections with
contemporary debates about the nature of text, their origin in the
practical contexts of writing, publishing, typesetting, editing, and
researching create a uniquely fresh, straightforward, and
practice-grounded perspective on problems which are otherwise
notorious for their obscurity and difficulty. This talk reviews the
emergence of these theories, looking closely at their social and
technological contexts as well as examining in detail the analysis and
reasoning deployed to support them.
Lecture 2: Towards a New Theory of Markup
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Thursday 30th July
The computer markup taxonomies of the 1980s were very effective in
explaining and systematizing various phenomena of text processing and
they played a crucial role in providing the ideology for the campaign
to promote the "content object" approach to designing and using text
processing systems. But although these taxonomies have been carried
over with little or no criticism into the new arenas of modern text
encoding, a close examination reveals that the most stable and
familiar portion of the received taxonomy is actually deeply flawed.
Drawing on the "speech-act theory" of Austin and Searle this talk will
analyze some problems with core portions of the standard markup
taxonomy and explore some possible revisions which accomodate the
problem cases and provide a new categorization with improved
explanatory and predictive power. In the process it will attempt to
improve our understanding of the fundamental nature of markup in
general. It will also suggest that perhaps any attempt to understand
how exactly how markup works will quickly encounter unresolved
problems in text ontology -- we still do not have a common
understanding of what text really is, and until we do peripheral
efforts to improve our knowledge of textual features such as markup
will be incomplete.
Lecture 3: The Revised Standard Theory of "What Text Really Is"
1.00-2.00pm, OUCS, Wednesday 5th August
This talk outlines a natural and commonsense view of the nature of
text.This theory of what text is, which we will call the "Revised
Standard Theory" is defined by these theses:
1) Realism: Texts exist and have properties independent of our theories
about them.
2) Structuralism: Texts are structures of objects.
3) Platonism: The objects which constitute texts are abstract.
4) Intentionalism: Texts are created by collective social acts
5) Hierarchicalism: The structure of texts is hierarchical
6) Verbalism: The objects which constitute texts are linguistic
objects; renditional features are not parts of texts, and therefore
not a proper locus of textual meaning.
These theses are explained and then arguments and evidence are adduced
to suggest that while the case for the Revised Standard Theory of text
may not yet be complete and decisive, it is nevertheless a coherent
view, and a plausible one, well supported by the evidence of theory
and practice. In the absence of any other well-developed competing
account the Revised Standard Theory should be considered the best
account of text that we have.
Allen Renear, the Director of the Brown University Scholarly
Technology Group, is currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the
the Humanities Computing Unit.
Dr. Allen Renear
Email: Allen_Renear@Brown.Edu
WWW: http://www.stg.brown.edu
Director, Scholarly Technology Group (on leave, 3/98-9/98)
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912
President, Association for Computing and the Humanities
http://www.ach.org
3/98-9/98: Visiting Fellow, Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University
13 Banbury Road / Oxford England. OX2 1QZ
Tel: +44 (0)1865 2-73221 (9am-5pm)
-83294 (5pm-9pm and weekends)