Editing

Traditional editing may not be necessary, but you may need to do some editorial preparation.

Any text you wish to use with TACT should be stored in TXT format.

In basic TACT markup, one marks text in different ways for three different purposes:

  1. to identify textual events,
  2. to mark text to ignore, and
  3. to identify certain words.

It is not unusual to add markup iteratively; first doing a preliminary markup scan, and using the resulting textbase for a while; then, from time to time revisiting the text, adding more markup and generating a new textbase.

There are several different established structural tagging schemes that TACT knows about:

I will describe COCOA

Here is an excerpt from Hamlet, beginning with a COCOA tag (shown in bold):
 


<speaker Horatio> What art thou that vsurp'st this time of night, 

Together with that Faire and Warlike forme 

In which the Maiesty of buried Denmarke 

Did sometimes march: By Heauen I charge thee speake. 

Thus, the tag shown in the above example says "At this spot in the text is the beginning of some text for which the speaker is Horatio".

More than one set of COCOA tags can be put in a text at the same time. The example above shows the speaker identified by means of "speaker tags". In the same text one might also find the beginning of acts and scenes marked by <act> and <scene> tags.

The value in a tag can consist of multiple-words. However, remember that tag values can be displayed by UseBase. If you expect to use a tag value in that way you should plan to keep the tag value short, so that when it is displayed in UseBase it doesn't take up too much screen space.

Some Examples of COCOA tags

<chap 7>

<a 3>

<type Prologue>

<title Origin of Species>

<from JB>

<actscene 2.4>


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http://chss.montclair.edu/~sotillos/tactfiles/editing.html | sotillos@mail.montclair.edu | created by Michael Frackoviak 12/99