Improving Access to Encoded Primary Texts

The Access Problem
An impressive amount of our literary heritage has now
been put into digital editions. Much of it is encoded in
XML, often using recognized standards for encoding such as
the TEI. One of the primary scholarly goals behind this activity
has been to increase access to the texts - by publishing them
on-line, and by making the text amenable to searching. The
XML tagging provides further added value for searching and
display. Metadata, where it exists at all, is mostly at the
collection level, or provides only a broad guide to the contents
of a specific work.
Between high-level metadata access, and a direct search on the
word forms of the text, there is little help for the reader. Due
to the immense labour involved in creating detailed subject
indexing, very few scholarly electronic texts have indexes or
finding aids which would draw the reader to specific sections
of the work.
To address this deficiency, a first trial has been made at
automatic indexing of a substantial non-fiction work. The
notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are a rich treasury of
the thought of one of the 19th century's most important
intellectuals. Comprised of over 6,500 individual entries (in
scope ranging from a single phrase to complete essays), they
are a valuable record of his thought and the active intellectual
currents of the time. We have captured the text of the notebooks
in electronic form, encoded with TEI. As a first step to building
a coherent subject index to this material, we have generated a
mapping between this material and a contemporary subject
index (Roget's first edition of his celebrated Thesaurus).
Our strategy has been to construct connections between the
conceptual categories in the Thesaurus and Coleridge's
individual notes, based upon a weighted measure of similarity
between the words of the note and the terms and sub-terms in
the Thesaurus. Common words are weighted lightly; rarely
used words heavily. Using this measure, we can connect each
note to one or more thesaurus entries, which then makes the
note accessible to searching through the thesaural categories.
Implementing these connections through topic map technology,
we have a stand-off tagging structure that relates these two
encoded works but still leaves both of them unchanged,
available to be delivered and shared with colleagues.
This presentation will describe the process by which we create
an appropriate mapping between Coleridge's text and Roget's
hierarchy, demonstrate the environment for creating and
managing the stand-off tagging, and describe the utility of the
resulting product.
The resulting edifice illustrates three important advantages for
access to scholarly text: the index connects and relates sections
of the text to larger, consistent conceptual categories; it provides
access for searching that is complementary to the texts' own
idiosyncratic terminology; it uses stand-off tagging to provide
access without direct intervention in the electronic source text.
This indexing structure, of value to researchers in its own right,
is also the scaffolding upon which we will construct our subject
index of the Notebooks, using modern terminology and
accessible conceptual categories.
Background to the Project
The notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are a valuable
and almost unknown resource. Much of Coleridge's work
as poet, philosopher, scientist, linguist, and theologian was
published only partially and fitfully in his time; the notebooks
contain some of his most innovative and interesting work. They
have been published in print in five large double volumes (text
and notes) by Princeton University Press, with indexes to
selected titles, names, and places; but there is no subject index.
The intention for the series was to publish a thematic index to
the whole, as volume 6. However, we argued (to the Canadian
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, who are
funding this work) that at the present time an electronic index
to the work would be of much greater utility to scholars who
wish to know how Coleridge's thought emerged and developed
over the 40 years which these notebooks cover.
The overall goals for the project include:
• creating an accurate electronic text of the entire notebook
corpus;
• creating an index and thesaurus for the notebooks which
will be a start to a synthetic index to Coleridge's thought;
• providing a web-based search and discovery system which
will meet the needs of scholars, making his thought on a
vast variety of topics more accessible. Bibliography
Coleridge, S.T. Ed. Kathryn Coburn. The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969.
Hüllen, W. A history of Roget's thesaurus: origins,
development, and design. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Pepper, S. The TAO of Topic Maps. 2001. Accessed
2005-03-15. <http://www.ontopia.net/topicmap
s/materials/tao.html>
Sebastiani, F. "Machine learning in automated text
categorization." ACM Computing Surveys 34.1 (2002): 1-47.
Thompson, H.S., and D. McKelvie. Hyperlink semantics for
standoff markup of read-only documents. Language Technology
Group, HCRC, University of Edinburgh, 1997. Accessed
2005-03-15. <http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/sgm
leu97.html>