<oo>→<dh> Digital humanities

Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2023-01-08T17:47:32+0000

XPath assignment #2

You can find an XML (TEI) version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at http://dh.obdurodon.org/bad-hamlet.xml. We’ve deliberately damaged some of the markup in this edition to introduce some inconsistencies, but the file is well-formed XML, which means that you can use XPath to explore it. You should download this file to your computer (typically that means right-clicking on the link and selecting save as) and open it in <oXygen/>.

Prepare your answers to the following questions in a markdown file upload it to Canvas as an attachment. As always, code snippets (including XPath snippets) in markdown must be surrounded with backticks.

Some of these tasks are thought-provoking, and even difficult. If you get stuck, do the best you can, and if you can’t get a working answer, give the answers you tried and explain where they failed to get the results you wanted. As always, you are encouraged to ask questions in the #xpath channel in Slack, but because you want to make progress in learning to debug your own code, your questions should tell us what you tried, what you expected, exactly what you got instead (not just didn’t work or got an error), and what you think the source of the problem is. Sometimes writing that sort of request for advice that will help you figure out what’s wrong on your own (see Rubber duck debugging), and even when it doesn’t, it will help us identify the difficult moments.

These tasks require the use of path expressions, predicates, and the functions count() and not(), but they should not require any other XPath functions. There may be more than one possible answer.

Using the Bad Hamlet document and the XPath browser window in <oXygen/>, construct XPath expressions that will do the following. Give the full XPath expressions in your answers, and not just the results:

1. Most (not all) speeches in Hamlet contain, as their immediate children, mostly metrical line (<l>) and anonymous block (<ab>) elements (an anonymous block is the TEI element that the tagger used to represent a non-metrical speech line). Speeches also typically contain, as immediate child elements, <speaker> elements, and may also contain stage directions (<stage>). We have deliberately left out at least one other type of subelement found as an immediate child of speech elements. Based on this understanding:
   • What XPath would find all of the speeches that do not contain any metrical lines as immediate children? How many are there?
   • What XPath would find all of the speeches that do not contain either any metrical lines (<l>) or any anonymous blocks (<ab>) as immediate children? How many are there? What do they contain instead?
2. Explain why the following four XPath expressions return two different results, and describe in prose what each of them does return, and why:
   • //sp[@who="Hamlet"]/l[1]
   • /descendant::sp[@who="Hamlet"]/l[1]
   • (//sp[@who="Hamlet"]/l)[1]
   • (/descendant::sp[@who="Hamlet"]/l)[1]

What to submit

You should turn in your answers to the above questions in a markdown file, that is, a file with the extension .md.