Once the decision has been taken to build up an ODD schema that documents the usages of the TEI guidelines within a given digital humanities project, a first step towards customising the guidelines can be to adapt the documentation to reflect the specific practices of the project. A good way to do so is to work specifically on the examples associated to element description, which can easily be changed in the ODD specification.
Let us imagine we create a simple specification for a dictionary project, thus integrating the modules: core, tei, header, textstructure and dictionaries. We can add a specification that changes the element <entry> as follows:
<elementSpec ident="entry" mode="change">
<exemplum>
<egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">
<entry xml:it="e-chat" xml:lang="fr">
<form>
<orth>chat</orth>
</form>
<gramGrp>
<pos>n</pos>
</gramGrp>
</entry>
</egXML>
</exemplum>
</elementSpec>
What we have done here is basically two-fold:
- Mark that we change the specification of the element by means of the @mode attribute set to “change” on the <elementSpec> element;
- Introduce an <exemplum> element with the example we want to record for this element.
When compiled to create an XHTML output, all pre-existing examples for from the TEI guidelines are replaced by the one(s), that have been introduced that way (see screenshot below).
See the full ODD example under:
https://github.com/laurentromary/ODDtopics/blob/master/ODD%20examples/changeExample.xml