Since the Text Encoding Initiative is the standard for academic text coding (brief intro at Wikipedia), it makes sense that if one were to produce a web edition of the BCP , that would be the place to start. While the TEI has tagging for a wide range of texts, it currently does not have formal guidelines for tagging liturgical texts. However, work from the CANTUS and CURSUS projects are applicable:
- CANTUS is a database-based model and therefore doesn’t translate exactly into xml but does offer some solutions that are readily adaptable. In particular their codes as listed here are helpful as a start.
- CURSUS is a TEI project which does not currently but hopes to interface with CANTUS and therefore has done some of the work toward integrating the CANTUS codes into an xml framework. Some of this work is presented discursively here.
To be honest, it’s a little surprising there’s not already one out there.
Well, there are the links to the html editions at Chad Wohler’s fantastic BCP site and there’s the BCP Online.
However… as a coder I find these lacking, particularly in terms of anchors and liturgical meta-data. Functionally, an xml version is a data source that could be manipulated in a wide variety of ways based on how you want to express it. While there may be xml behind some of these html files, none of the sites are doing some of the concordance, or custom xpath/xslt work that could be produced out of an xml base document.
About ten years ago, Simon Kershaw was working on something called LitML at Cambridge:
http://www.oremus.org/LitML/
I remember being on the listserv, but don’t think that anything ever came of it.
Thanks for pointing to this, Paul–I’ll shoot him and email and see if I get a response…
A couple of people have pointed me at this thread.
The attempt at LitML gathered together a number of very distinguished XMLers, including Robin Cover, and some distinguished liturgists. But it never really got off the ground, partly because there was no agreement on whether a mark-up was required for academic / historical liturgy, or for current flexible liturgy — or whether it was possible to devise a scheme that could suit both. I do think that the more pressing requirement is a language for current liturgical material. If there’s enough enthusiasm it might be worth resurrecting.
simon
I’d be glad to throw in my two cents worth! And I agree that the contemporary liturgy angle is more pressing.