Week 7: Bump in the Road

This week began well, but quickly became frustrating.  I finished much of the Schematron for the TEI Header and was ready to test what I had done against a couple of VWWP legacy and new texts.  I was nervous, but hoping for the best.  I had felt like I had taken so much time with the two different kinds of conceptual mappings and then the writing process had taken a while, so I wanted to be successful on the first try. 

I pulled up one legacy and one new text in Oxygen, along with the editor version of Schematron.  I decided to try the new text first.  I selected the correct version of Schematron against which to validate the TEI document.  Immediately, I got an error, stating that there was a problem with the TEI namespace.  I spent about 4 hours searching online, Googling as much as I could to figure out what could possibly be wrong with the way I had declared the namespace.  I came across a post on the TEI boards where some other people were having issues with the TEI namespace.  Someone had posted another version of the namespace, so I tried it.  Essentially, it seemed like it had to be declared twice.  It looked strange to me, but Oxygen no longer complained about it.  I ended up changing the namespace yet again, after Michelle told me that Professor Walsh uses a different version. But that was a bit later. I ran the validation again, and much to my surprise, the TEI document validated.  I was in shock.  I immediately knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure it out.  I tried Googling and looking in all of the readings that Michelle had given me.  There was nothing I could find that addressed the problem of Schematron not catching any errors. 

I ended up meeting with Michelle later in the week and we tried playing with different options available within Oxygen.  I clicked on what seemed an endless number of options, in endless combinations and nothing worked.  I thought that maybe I needed to change the version of XPath I was using, but that did not work either.  I also tried typing the XPath directly into the search and that worked perfectly.  So, Michelle and I are thinking that my XPath is written fine and really don't know what it could be.  She has promised to speak with Professor Walsh as well as writing an acquaintance of hers at Mulberry Technologies.  This was definitely a frustrating week and I feel powerless.