Piggy-backing on Sarah and Patrick's comments about working on our encoding challenge on Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, I'd like to talk quickly about the challenge we've had of representing the unconventional aspects of the comic. The page we've decided to work on is a complex flow chart that describes how Brosh's narrator envisions herself. The complicated relationships between the elements are not only multi-dimensional (which we've managed to solve by using the TEI rules for marking up graphs), but also range in intensity. In order to deal with describing intensity, we have had to come up with our own rules. We've used a combination of pre-existing rules for representing the numerical amounts within a tag (like the number of inputs and outputs in relation to a specific node in a graph) with some of our own invention to represent the intensity of the pointing numerically. In doing, so we've managed to represent something unconventional in a more conventional format, but I feel like we've lost the fun and spontaneity of the way that this intensity is represented within the comic.
If the point of a mark-up language is to make a universally readable representation of a text, is there a certain amount of fun and difference that has to be compromised in order to make the text machine readable? Or is that something that we can add back in using a variety of different interpretive tags of our own invention?
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