THL Toolbox > Essays > Introduction to JIATS and THL Essays Online

Introduction to JIATS and THL Essays Online

Contributor(s): José Cabezón, Michael Cox, David Germano, Nathaniel Grove, Alison Melnick, Steven Weinberger.

THL uses a common style for textual submissions across all projects it hosts, including the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS) and Encyclopedia submissions. THL’s texts in general are stored permanently using a markup language called XML (“eXtensible Markup Language”), a powerful system that facilitates complex searching and multiple modes of delivery over the web. This is a global standard used widely in the publishing industry.

For THL editors to publish submissions, we need authors to perpare essays and articles in specific formats. While these stylistic conventions and formats may appear idiosyncratic at times, following them greatly helps the THL/JIATS editors and staff in preparing your document for the web. We therefore ask that you submit your final article or essay as a Microsoft Word document prepared according to the guidelines for creating a Glossary Table, applying Word styles, formatting bibliographic references and other elements of the essay, and so forth. This allows us to mostly automate the publishing process and avoid having to find funds to pay staff to manually prepare each article/essay. Without preparing your article/essay according to these guidelines, there is no way to automatically transform it into XML, and hence no way to include it in JIATS or THL.

XML and the Power of Web Publishing

The real revolution of the web with regard to texts and markup languages such as XML is the ability to intellectually mark up the structure and content of essays and texts rather than simply specifying how content visually appears (that is, the formatting of content). Thus, rather than italicizing a title of a text you cite, you create an entry in the Glossary Table for it as a “text title”; rather than simply block-indenting a citation, you apply the “citation” Word style. This allows for searching across specific content, such as text titles or place names, or further refining searches across Tibetan text titles, for example. It also allows greater flexibility in the way the essays can be displayed online. The technically inclined can read more about XML in the section “About XML Markup” in Using Word Styles for THL Markup, but the rest of you can ignore such detail!

In order to enable authors to prepare their essays for web publication in ways that don’t require learning new software and technologies, we ask you to create a Glossary Table in which for non-English words you enter the transliteration, English translation, type of word it is, language, and so forth. We also ask that you enter a few types of English names in the Glossary Table. This is the bulk of the work that we ask authors to do in preparing their essays. We also ask that authors apply Word styles for structural components of the essay. For this, we use Microsoft Word styles. Using the world’s most common word processing software, authors can label different components of their text in Word using present “styles.” For example, instead of simply manually formatting all citations as a block indent, we have created a “citation” Word style. This style is then applied to all citations in the essay and when THL staff converts the essay into XML, the citations will have the XML markup for a citation. A stylesheet governs how XML essays are displayed online; this controls how content like text titles are displayed as well as how structural elements like a citation is displayed. For example, the stylesheet has a section for the online display of citations (extra space before and after the citation; indented on the right and left; and so forth). This ensures that all citations will display uniformly across all JIATS articles and THL essays. The stylesheet includes separate sections for displaying text titles, article titles, person names, terms, and so forth. The other great benefit of this system is that subsequently we can simply change the section in the stylesheet that governs how citations appear online and, without having to change anything in any of the hundreds of essays that use this stylesheet, all occurrences marked as citations in all such essays will automatically change in the way they appear online. This allows for easy reformatting of texts.

This system has another distinct advantage: it allows for powerful searches across one or more user-specified components of the essay. For example, one can search for “Lhasa” just within citations in the essay, or just within text titles occurring in the essay, or just within Tibetan text titles, and so forth. Creating the Glossary Table with the language specified for each entry allows for searches confined, for example, to Tibetan or Chinese or Mongolian or Sanskrit words that occur in the essay, or even more narrowly, one can search just on Tibetan text titles or Sanskrit place names, and so forth.

There are two main types of Word styles: paragraph styles and character styles. Paragraph styles, as the name implies, apply to the entire paragraph and ensure that in the process of staff conversion of submissions for publication, the proper markup for paragraphs is inserted. There are separate paragraph styles for prose text in the body of the essay, for indented citations, for numbered and bulletted lists, for footnotes/endnotes, and for bibliographic entries in the Bibliography section. Character styles are applied to specific text within a paragraph – for instance, a Tibetan (to be explained in detail below).

For these reasons, we ask authors to prepare their essays in Microsoft Word according to the guidelines included in How To Prepare An Essay For JIATS Or THL. This allows staff members to convert your work for web publication in as timely a fashion as possible, thus getting your essay published online in the shortest time possible.

How Essays Display Online: An Overview

A brief explanation should help clarify the benefits of these procedures. Each article will be published with a right-hand navigation box – essentially an enhanced table of contents – with four sections: a table of contents for the article, controls, back links with help link, and navigation arrows (for an example, view the current issue of JIATS at http://www.jiats.org/). This box is present throughout all sections of the essay and provides easy controls for navigation through an essay. Most significantly, it allows the reader to read the essay in different views, as described below. To make this possible, you will need to create Glossary Table according to the conventions (for details, see The Glossary Table) and to make sure that Word Styles are correctly applied in your essay (for details, see Applying Word Styles).

For the online display of an essay housed in THL (this includes JIATS articles), in the drop-down list on the right-hand side of the online essay, the Specify View function allows readers to specify which view they would like to use to read the article. The options are currently Popular View, Scholarly View, and Tibetan View (although Tibetan View is not yet implemented). At present these views differ only with regard to how Tibetan and Mongolian words are displayed. This is an important issue with Tibetan since Tibetan words have orthography which is quite divergent from their pronunciation. The term rendered in Wylie transliteration (for example, bsgrubs) is all but impossible to pronounce for people who do not know Tibetan, leading to problems with retention and use. At the same time, Tibetanists want to see the proper transliteration showing every letter. Moreover, scholars who do not know Tibetan language may still desire to know the proper spelling of Tibetan names and terms for scholarly reference purposes. In addition, ethnic Tibetans may have difficulty reading the roman transliteration of Tibetan, and hence would prefer Tibetan script versions of Tibetan names and terms. Thus, there are distinct communities of users who have strong needs to see Tibetan words in roman script transliteration (using the THL Extended Wylie scheme), roman script phonetic rendering (using the THL Simplified Phonetics scheme), and Tibetan script (using Unicode encoding).

We ask that whenever possible you supply English translations for non-English terms used in your essay (with the exception of some proper nouns – people’s names, place names, and so forth). This both makes the essay more accessible to non-specialists and makes clear to specialists your interpretation of non-English terms. In addition, the translations are included in the glossary that appears at the end of every article.

When a translation is supplied for a Tibetan word it will appear in this way: at the first occurrence of that term in the essay, in Scholarly View the English translation will appear with the THL Extended Wylie transliteration in parentheses, and in Popular View the translation will appear with the phonetic rendering in parentheses. For all subsequent occurrences of that word, only the translation will appear (unless there is a specific reason for the transliteration to appear – such as a discussion of the word itself). If a translation is not supplied for a Tibetan word, it will display as Wylie in Scholarly View and as phonetics in Popular View (in Tibetan View, it will display in Tibetan font, but this view has not been implemented yet).

• Scholarly View: The royal succession of the Tibetan emperors (btsan po) sets out the signposts for early Tibetan history and its periodization.

• Popular View: The royal succession of the Tibetan emperors (tsenpo) sets out the signposts for early Tibetan history and its periodization.

• Tibetan View (not yet implemented): The royal succession of the Tibetan emperors (བཙན་པོ་) sets out the signposts for early Tibetan history and its periodization.

Non-English proper nouns such as people’s names, place names, organization names, and so forth appear in roman (that is, non-italics), with the first letter capitalized (when the first letter of a Tibetan proper noun is the a prefix, which is represented by an apostrophe [’], the second letter is capitalized). People’s names also have their birth and death dates, dates of their reign (for rulers), date of creation for texts, and so forth indicated parenthetically on their first occurrence in the text. All other non-English words appear in italics. All the capitalization, italicization, and so forth is done online for readers by the THL’s publishing system. Thus, the way essays display online is often different from the way we are asking you to prepare your essay.

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