Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 345.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com> (17)
Subject: Re: 14.0339 errors in e-boos:
[2] From: "Christian Wittern" <wittern@iis.sinica.edu.tw> (19)
Subject: RE: 14.0318 XML ebooks from Virginia
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 10:14:36 +0100
From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0339 errors in e-boos:
Some interesting responses to the fact of errors in e-text: the most
creative is the most recent -- 'if there are errors, it's the reader's
fault' !! I find that fascinating -- we know that denial of
responsibility is typical of our culture at its worst, but this is some
sort of record-setting denial.
Also of interest is what might be called "the Von Daniken response" --
old-fashioned people hate us so they look for errors -- it's really
too laughable to address.
No, folks, someone is paying too little attention to what goes into the
folders. The errors I mentioned in Chaucer are of the most egregious
type (and they were reported in Chaucernet, BTW) one of them destroys
the meter of the line: it's hard to see how it got overlooked (of
course, it can be argued that we no longer care about aesthetics, I
guess), and the other messes up the syntax. God forbid that we should
want to know what Chaucer may have written or what he may have meant
thereby.....
Oh brave new world....
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 10:51:32 +0100
From: "Christian Wittern" <wittern@iis.sinica.edu.tw>
Subject: RE: 14.0318 XML ebooks from Virginia
Dear Humanistis,
The recent announcement from Virginia (14.0318) led me to believe I could
find some fine examples of XML usage, possibly even using the TEI markup on
the announced website.
I was quite disappointed to find out that this is far from being the case.
After much looking around in this vast (but not noisy) digital library, I
could not spot even the smallest example of a XML ebook. The only ebooks I
could find where not in the open standard format XML, but in a format used
by some company in Redmond, whose name I can't remember at the moment,
available for some computers running their own proprietary operating system.
So, here is my advice to the ebook publishers in Virginia: If you think it
is worth publishing ebooks in XML, or maybe even in the Open Ebook format,
please go ahead and do so!! But please don't announce ebooks in proprietary
formats as a great breakthrouhg in electronic publishing.
Christian Wittern
Dr. Christian Wittern
Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
276, Kuang Ming Road, Peitou 112
Taipei, TAIWAN
Tel. +886-2-2892-6111#65, Email chris@ccbs.ntu.edu.tw
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