Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media

4. Using the Extensible Markup Language in Cultural Analysis and Presentation

CHAPTER 4 Using the Extensible Markup Language in Cultural Analysis and Presentation Natalie UNderBerg aNd rUdy McdaNiel Insights about using the extensible markup language (XML) can be used to assist cultural heritage research in a variety of ways. In an earlier publication (McDaniel and Underberg 2007), we briefly explained the nature and potential usefulness of XML for humanities and social science research involving narrative: Metadata is data about data, or descriptive data that is intended to describe or represent preexisting data from another source. Such data does not need to be visible to the user; in fact, metadata is often invisible and works behind the scenes in much the same fashion as hypertext markup language, or HTML. XML is one such metadata classification system that is derived from SGML (the same parent language of HTML) . . . It is no surprise that the next generation Semantic Web is being created based on the foundational elements of XML. Using XML as a metadata system on the Internet can lead to more relevant searches and substantially improved online experiences for a user . . . Rather than simply performing a keyword search for matching keywords, a search engine would be able to perform the additional task of seeking out content based on semantic anchors . This process involves looking for examples of the usage of the words in the context in which they were originally intended . (58) Using the Extensible Markup Language 49 XML emerged as part of the overall development of humanities computing, concerned as it was for expanding the potential usefulness of a digital collection beyond that of the original researcher ’s intentions. One major project in the developing field of humanities computing has been the text encoding initiative (TEI), which began in 1987 and developed a widely used XML version of its own (Hockey 2006). XML works by embedding tags within the document that identify relevant features within that document. It is up to the designer to identify the particular features encoded and the relation between them. XML is particularly useful for humanities and cultural anthropology computing because it enables multiple forms of processing, providing a flexible way to encode aspects of textual structure. Hockey offers the TEI example of using XML to identify structural division like chapters, sections, speeches, and so forth, to enable the researcher to retrieve and analyze all speeches by Ophelia in Hamlet. XML is also particularly useful in the humanities because of its ability to imitate the work of humanities scholars themselves. As Hockey explains, XML has the potential to more accurately reflect what researchers desire to do. For example, many researchers may want to directly access a particular part of a document rather than having to wade through the entire piece. XML links can utilize XML-based structures embedded within the document itself to enable more precise linking (to a single chapter, for instance). These links can then be stored external to the document and provide researchers with particular paths through the document (Hockey 2006). In the digital humanities, a well-known example is the Perseus Project at Tufts. XML is important for digital ethnography because of the nature of digital information itself. XML is flexible and able to be manipulated in multiple ways. It has grown considerably in popularity in the digital humanities particularly for those full text sources encoded according to the TEI. XML allows specific details within documents to be presented, interpreted, and manipulated, as well as making it easier to “chunk” and integrate both data and metadata—resulting in innovative publication 50 Digital Ethnography forms that make use of the distinctive features of the medium, such as its capacity to enable multiple paths through information and its ability to provide more robust context for that information (Cameron and Robinson 2007; Hockey 2006). The key is to take advantage of the potential afforded by the digital medium to enact cultural analysis, much like hypertext ethnography (discussed earlier), which exploits the features of digital environments to tell a story. In the 1990s archives and libraries became interested in the delivery of digital resources rather than simply creating catalogs or finding aids for those resources. Publishers had also begun making journals available digitally, but with an eye more toward delivery rather than manipulation or analysis. Digital media was conceived of more as a communication than a computational medium (Hockey 2006). The use of XML in digital ethnography today allows us to go beyond delivery of resources...