Week 5: Odd Reference Book Rejects

When it came time for Brandon and me to select a book for the Encoding Challenge I decided to peruse my own bookshelf for ideas, as its collection too often goes neglected while I work on school readings and assignments. If you read my post in week two about David Levithan’s novel-as-dictionary, it might not be surprising that I have a soft spot for reference books, and actually collect them. While this collection includes several conventional sources like dictionaries and thesauri, I prefer to search used bookstores for odd reference books, referencing often-random subjects, sometimes with equally odd formatting. Below are pictures and descriptions from two examples that Brandon and I considered for the encoding challenge.

The first is Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, which uses literary theory, structuralism specifically, to explore love, its language, and what it reveals about its subject and object. Each entry has a word, a conceptual definition in the context of love’s discourse, and Barthes’ explanation, pulled from other literary sources, conversations with friends, and his own experience. Some entries also feature footnotes. You can see a photo below of one of the entries, with large text indicating a phrase or concept used by the lover, the corresponding word and its definition in smaller, centred text, followed by numbered reference entries with their source glossed in the left margin. This book was a close contender for us because we thought the different sizes and placements of texts for each entry might be interesting to represent with XML.

The second is probably my most random reference book, Schott’s Original Miscellany. It’s sort of a tongue-in-cheek collection of trivial but interesting facts and references (see photo of description below). Because the volume gathers so many different types of information the entries on a single page can have vastly different content, as you can see from the pictured page, which helpfully features small diagrams of air marshaling signals, and a list of the Patron Saints. This one was rejected on the grounds that it might be too complicated to represent such varied formats in XML, and even deciding whether to encode for form or content seemed difficult to parse in this context. 

Ultimately we did choose a book from my shelves, which Brandon will write about in his post, but it is not a reference book. It was interesting for me to see the examples my fellow bloggers chose or considered that featured marginalia, because our chosen book is about marginalia, specifically in library books.