Hyper, Multi, or Single? Thinking about Text in Graphs and Trees

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of combining the Text-As-Graph (TAG) and the XML data models. It proposes a digital editing workflow in which users can model, edit, and store text in TAG, and subsequently export the textual data to XML for further analysis or publication with XML-based tools. The conversion from TAGML to XML presents several interesting challenges on a technical level as well as a philological level. Overall, we argue that there may be many pragmatic reasons to encode cultural heritage texts in XML, but we have to be mindful of the XML framework becoming synonymous with the framework in which we conceptualize text. The paper therefore dives deep into the translation from conceptual model to logical model(s) and argues in favor of understanding the affordances and limitations of the technologies we use.