Balisage Presentation 13 August 2009

My talk at Balisage in Montreal went very much as planned. The slides took as long as I had paced them to last: 28 minutes. Then I did two software demonstrations, one of the nmerge commandline tool and another of the Alpha multi-version wiki. The former is more or less finished (though I keep tweaking it) and the Alpha wiki is about half done, but usable. There was time afterwards for a few questions. The best of these came from Fabio Vitali, who also works with Angelo Di Iorio on a diff calculating algorithm for edited XML texts. He convinced me after the talk that their method of computing diffs has some advantages over my simplistic greedy approach for XML texts. But my method I think is still a good fallback in the general case. I think the best thing is to try to incorporate the basic idea of their JNDiff algorithm, which is making the merging algorithm optionally XML-aware, rather than try to use their code, which is not really open-source yet.

I think the paper went down well because of the demos. No one else whose talk I saw presented any finished software. It was mostly work in progress - the usual conference fare. But reactions to it were not very critical. They had little to say I think because it was not about an application of XSLT or XQuery - their favourite tools. But the talk at least has exposed the MVD idea to a wider audience. No more excuses any more for not mentioning it when discussing solutions to overlapping hierarchies.

I received favourable comments from the upper reaches of the Balisage hierarchy which seemed genuine. And I am encouraged by that.

I have updated nmerge with the version I demonstrated at Montreal. Also there is a copy of the wiki in its current state, minus any MVDs. I can't use any of the usual examples because of copyright restrictions. So I'll have to create some of my own pretty soon.

The Biggest Advantage of Using MVDs

I suddenly realised now I am here in Montreal preparing to defend my ideas against 100 experts from around the world that I have failed to notice all this time the biggest advantage of MVDs. And it is this: The alternative to computing the interrelations between multi-version texts can only be encoding them manually. In speaking of the supposed advantages of standard XML tools what is often forgotten is the enormous human cost of training people to use markup, and getting them to encode it and check it against the originals. I know from experience that this is very expensive. We literally spent thousands of man-hours encoding variants in Wittgenstein. If we could have had a tool for doing that automatically, much of that time and money would have been saved.

Another advantage of computing interrelations automatically is that it is so easy to get back what you put in, unmolested. Hand-encoded XML hard-wires the interconnections between versions, and getting back the original text can be a hard problem if you decide later to change to another technology. With nmerge I just press the "archive" button and it is done.

If computers are good for anything they are good for saving human effort.