1.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing - UCLA ...

ecomes obvious very quickly. XML tags may describe formal features of works such as
stanzas, footnotes, cross-outs, or other changes in a text. XSL tags are based on
conventions for domain and discipline specific tasks. The tags used in marking up legal
or medical documents are very different from those appropriate to the study of literature,
history, or biography. Even when tags are standardized in a field or within a research
group, making decisions about which tags to use in any situation involves a judgment call
and relies on considerable extra-textual knowledge. In the example above, the concept of
is far more elastic than that of .
XML documents are always structured as nested hierarchies, tree structures, with
parent and child nodes and all that this rigid organization implies. The implications of
this rigidity brought the tensions between mathesis and aesthesis to the fore in what
serves as an exemplary case. The hierarchical structure of XML was reflected in a
discussion of what was called the OHCO thesis. OHCO stands for “ordered hierarchy of
content objects”. The requirements of XML were such that only a single hierarchy could
be imposed on (actually inserted into) a document. This meant that a scholar was
frequently faced with the problem of choosing between categories or types of information
to be tagged. A conflict between marking the graphic features of an original document
and the bibliographic features of the same document was one such problem faced by
scholars migrating materials into electronic forms. Did one chunk a text into chapters, or
into pages, since you could not do both (a chapter could end and another begin on the
same page, so the two systems cancelled each other). Such decisions might seem trivial,
hair-splitting, but not if attention to material features of a text are considered important.
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