THL Toolbox > Developers' Zone > THL Database Technologies and Models > Our Guide to TEI XML Markup > Text Markup - Citations
Text Markup - Citations
Contributor(s): Nathaniel Garson & David Germano
There are two types of citations: those from written, textual material and the citation, or quotation, of a person speaking (whether actual or “mythic”). These are marked up differently. Textual citations use the <title> and <quote> elements, while spoken quotations use the <persName> and <q> elements. The actual cited or quoted material goes within either the <quote> or the <q> element. Both of these can, but are not required to, have paragraphs (<p>) or verses (<lg> and <l>) as their children so that the structure of the citation can be preserved. (See Text Markup - Structural Divisions.) For shorter, unstructured quotations, which do not have internal paragraphs or verses, the rend attribute can be used to determine whether the quoted text is displayed inline or as an indented paragraph. If the rend attribute is set to “inline”, the quotation will be incorporated into the present paragraph without break. The default, when no rend attribute is given, is to display the quote as a separate, indented paragraph. In all cases, quotation marks should be included if they are to be displayed. The styles do not automatically add quotation marks.
Citations from texts are dealt with using <title> and <quote> elements. The <title> element marks the text’s title from which the quote originates, and the <quote> element encloses the quoted material itself. <q> should not be confused with <quote>, which is used for a quotation from a speaker. The general format is:
The <lg> and <l> elements are for indicating verse as described below.
Textual Citations
Marking up textual citations involves marking up the title and marking up the passage cited. For Tibetan texts, we use the <title> and <quote> elements. We do not use the more elaborate <cit> element with a child <bibl> also described in the TEI P4 guidelines, as bibliographic information is generally not included in Tibetan texts and in modern scholarly essays such material if found in footnotes, which require different markup. The general format is:
<title level="m" type="tantra">gsang ba’i snying po</title> las/_ <quote>
<lg>
<l>/rdo rje phung po yan lag ni/_</l> <l>/rdzogs pa'i sangs rgyas lnga ru gra/</l>
</lg>
</quote>
Titles
Titles are marked with a <title> element. The title element should encompass only the source’s title and should not include the las or any other grammatical particle that is outside of the text’s proper name. The type attribute can be used to further specify the kind of title. However, this does not need to be done in the first round of mark-up. To include a translation of the title, insert a <foreign lang= “eng”> element at the end of the title and place the translation in it:
<title level="m" type="tantra" lang="tib">gsang ba’i snying po </title>
Citation Text
The text of the citation should be marked up in the <quote> elements. The TEI guidelines define <quote> as an element that “contains a phrase or passage attributed by the narrator or author to some agency external to the text.” The plain text can be included directly in the <quote> element, or structural markup, such as paragraphs (<p>) and verses (<lg>) may be included within the <quote> element. If the <quote> element contains plain text, the rend attribute determines its display. The default (with no rend attribute) displays the quote as a separate indented paragraph (like <blockquote> in HTML). If the text should be displayed in line, then the rend attribute should be set to “inline”. Thus, an example of the latter would be the one above:
<quote rend="inline"̇>“contains a phrase ....”</quote>
Speech Quotations
Quotations of a person’s speech should be enclosed in <q> tags and not in <quote> tags. The <q> element can contain all the elements for marking up both prose (<p>) and verse (<lg>). The speaker’s name, if given, can be marked up in the <persName> element outside the <q> element. As with the textual citations, described above, the <q> element can have a rend attribute of “inline” if the quote is to be displayed as part of the parent paragraph. Otherwise, it is set off as a separate indented paragraph.
All quotation marks should be included within the <q> tags, if the are to be displayed.
An example of an in-line speech quotation would be:
<persName>Milarepa</persName> said, <q rend="inline">“All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable end, which is sorrow.”</q>
