The following is a list of the primary sources encoded in Roland^HT. Most of them are text-based; works composed in other media are designated as such in the "Title/Name" column (see, for example, Angoulême Carvings).

Year	Author	Title/Name	Geo. Origin
~817-836	Einhard	The Life of Charlemagne	France
1095-99	unk.	Song of Roland	France
~1100	Pseudo-Turpin	History of Charles the Great and Orlando	France
1100s	unk.	Angoulême Carvings, stonework	France
~1150	Pfaffe Konrad	Rolandslied	Germany
~1180	Bertrand de Bar-Sur-Aube	The Song of Girart of Vienne	France
XII-XIIIc	unk.	Roland and Oliver, Chartres Cathedral statues	France
XII-XIVc	unk.	Firumbras	England
XII-XIVc	unk.	Reims Triptych, stone carving	France
XIIIc	unk.	Karlamagnús Saga	Norway
XIVc	unk.	The Middle English Song of Roland	England
early XIVc	unk.	Otuel and Roland	England
1300s	unk.	Rouland and Vernagu	England
1308-21	Dante Alighieri	Divine Comedy	Italy
1300-1600	unk.	Cân Rolant	Wales
XVc	unk.	Dubrovnik Roland, statue	Croatia
1471-86	Matteo Maria Boiardo	Orlando Innamorato	Italy
1532	Ludovico Ariosto	Orlando Furioso	Italy
1572	unk.	The Tale of Ralph the Collier	Scotland
1605-15	M. de Cervantes Saavedra	Don Quixote	Spain
1810	William Sotheby	Constance de Castille	England
1820	Thomas Campbell	The Brave Roland	England
1831	Laetitia Elizabeth Landon	Roland's Tower. A Legend of the Rhine.	England
1839	Emmeline Stuart-Wortley	The Tower of Roland	England
1849	Henry B. Hirst	The Penance of Roland	USA
1849	William Motherwell	Roland and Rosabelle	Scotland
1855	Robert Browning	Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came	England
1860	William Caldwell Roscoe	Eliduke, Count of Yveloc	England
1868	Thomas Westwood	An Angler's Dream Under Rolandseck	England
1875	Albert B. Barrows	Roland of Algernon	USA
1901	Robert Williams Buchanan	The Death of Roland	England
1903	John Warren	Roland at Roncesvalles	England
1911	Maurice H. Hewlett	style="font-style:italic;"The Birth of Roland	England
1930	Benjamin Low	Roland, A Symphonic Poem	USA
~1941-45	League of Roland	Roland: Country First	England
1942	Adair Forrester	The Children's Story of Roland	England
1949	Peter Racine Fricker	Rollant et Oliver	England
1975	L. Sprague de Camp	The Compleat Enchanter	USA
1978	Warren Zevon	Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner	USA
1982-2004	Stephen King	The Dark Tower I-VII	USA
1994	Gianni Celati	Orlando Innamorato	Italy
1995	Greg Roach	The Madness of Roland	USA
1999	Shayne Amaya et al.	Roland: Days of Wrath	USA/Brazil

Notably absent from the above list is Shel Silverstein's 1973 "Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie," written for the rock group Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. Although parts of the song are encoded, they are commented out because permission to use the work online has been denied by the copyright holder. Encoding data from Silverstein are included in the statistics presented in this dissertation.

In the first – HTML-based – version of RolandHT, semantic information was encoded into the project by way of toggling (using JavaScript) visibility of such information when the user clicks on a given link. For example, the Song of Roland excerpt titled "knight, ambassador, coward" has a hyperlink around Roland's words to his stepfather Ganelon: "I love you not a bit":



Love in general, and its lack between Roland and Ganelon in particular, is a recurrent theme in the corpus. An interesting exception to this is the Karlamagnús Saga episode in which the two meet, become kin, and swear fellowship to each other. To highlight this, clicking on the link brings up an overlaid comment, "Ah, but they loved each other once," complete with a link to the excerpt titled "how rollant met guenelun":



This approach proved frustrating for most of the twenty or so informal beta testers of the project in 2001: every link required two clicks instead of the customary one, considerably slowing down the reading process. In addition, although the prose blurbs conveyed thematic information, there was no categorized theme set. Consequently there was no way to see, for example, a list of all the excerpts treating the subject of love.

Having encoded themes and imagery that appeared interesting at the time of encoding, I analyzed the statistics of their occurrence in the corpus. The following themes were deleted (number of occurrences in parentheses):

Deleted themes
army (4)	pity (1)
ceremony (3)	prudishness (1)
conspiracy (1)	ritual (2)
disguise (1)	spite (3)
denial (2)	stubbornness (3)
gift (3)	summons (1)
hostility (2)	temper (4)
jealousy (2)	threefold repetition (2)
mastery (1)	writing (2)

I also consolidated some rarely occurring theme elements and attributes (marked with an @ symbol before the attribute name) and semantically similar or more appropriate ones:

Original theme/language	Folded into...
arrogance	overconfidence
adultery	kinship
council	counsel
cruelty	violence
crusade	violence
gore	violence
incest	kinship
invulnerability	unconquerable
martyrdom	sacrifice
massacre	violence
prophecy	magic
prudishness (1)	chastity
prudishness (1)	chivalry
ritual (1)	chivalry
rolands priorities	chivalry
theft	treachery
trust	fellowship
family ties	kinship
@imagined['yes']	@realized['no']

Working on encoded places and character names (which, being recurrent and/or echoes of each other, are one of the elements that tie the corpus together) led to regularization of their names to their presently most widely used forms. Aix and Aix-la-Chapelle became Aachen. Among characters, Basile was changed to Basil, Balsan – to Basin, Blancandrin – to Blancadrin; Geluvis to Geluviz, Gilem to Gille, and Olivieri to Oliver. Problems arose during regularization, some of them of a surprisingly political nature. For example: do I encode a river as located in Taiwan, or in China? (The answer to this was ultimately China, because both of the following conditions are true: the primary source had explicitly placed it there; and the river was in China at the time of the book's writing.)

The other significant challenge was posed by the name of Roland's mother. Her names are sometimes wildly disparate and clearly not variations upon one another. In the corpus, she is called in turn Gille, Gilem and Bertha. Bertha occurs only once, but this is a common name for her in most of the Mediterranean, and so it seems unwise to fold Bertha into Gille. Gilem, however, was folded into Gille.

Places acquired a new attribute – @where – which denotes the country (if working with a city, church, etc.) or the continent (if it is a country, mountain, etc.) within which it is located. This will allow users to search not only for specific places, but for what is located in, for example, Asia.

To arrive at the following statistics, I have broken the corpus works down into four temporal groups: medieval (designated MVL below, works written in or before 1350); Renaissance (REN, 1351-1650), modern (MOD, 1651-1899) and contemporary (CON, 1900-present). For each theme, the number columns represent the number of times that theme is encoded in works from the relevant time period. The percentages were calculated using the total number of <theme> element occurrences in the works from that period. Note that the same theme was, as likely as not, encoded multiple times in the same excerpt, so the numbers below do not represent the number of excerpts in which these themes occur.

Statistics for the top five most often occurring themes for each time period are rendered in boldface.

Theme	MVL #	MVL %	REN #	REN %	MOD #	MOD %	CON #	CON %
accusation	44	4.64%	4	2.72%	22	4.24%	9	4.10%
anger	30	3.16%	5	3.40%	5	0.96%	3	1.36%
beauty	5	0.53%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
betrothal	3	0.32%	0	0.00%	4	0.77%	0	0.00%
chastity	2	0.21%	2	1.36%	3	0.58%	1	0.45%
chivalry	22	2.32%	4	2.72%	19	3.66%	7	3.18%
combat	105	11.06%	17	11.56%	40	7.71%	35	15.91%
conquest	6	0.63%	0	0.00%	7	1.35%	2	0.91%
counsel	3	0.32%	1	0.68%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
courage	30	3.16%	6	4.08%	16	3.08%	1	0.45%
cowardice	9	0.95%	6	4.08%	2	0.39%	1	0.45%
death	65	6.85%	3	2.04%	80	15.41%	12	5.45%
deceit	11	1.16%	7	4.76%	0	0.00%	5	2.27%
defiance	1	0.11%	0	0.00%	2	0.39%	0	0.00%
diplomacy	8	0.84%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
dream	6	0.63%	2	1.36%	6	1.16%	1	0.45%
evil	2	0.21%	0	0.00%	4	0.77%	0	0.00%
fear	8	0.84%	1	0.68%	2	0.39%	0	0.00%
fellowship	40	4.21%	0	0.00%	25	4.82%	11	5.00%
glory	4	0.42%	0	0.00%	5	0.96%	0	0.00%
grief	31	3.27%	6	4.08%	25	4.82%	5	2.27%
honesty	1	0.11%	0	0.00%	4	0.77%	0	0.00%
honor	9	0.95%	0	0.00%	9	1.73%	0	0.00%
insult	5	0.53%	1	0.68%	3	0.58%	0	0.00%
journey	3	0.32%	6	4.08%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
kinship	3	0.32%	0	0.00%	5	0.96%	0	0.00%
knighthood	13	1.37%	0	0.00%	20	3.85%	7	3.18%
lament	9	0.95%	0	0.00%	2	0.39%	0	0.00%
love	29	3.06%	15	10.20%	26	5.01%	16	7.28%
loyalty	19	2.00%	1	0.68%	15	2.89%	7	3.18%
madness	14	1.48%	13	8.84%	2	0.39%	14	6.36%
magic	8	0.84%	1	0.68%	3	0.58%	25	11.36%
marriage	10	1.05%	1	0.68%	10	1.93%	2	0.91%
monjoie	4	0.42%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
nobility	11	1.16%	0	0.00%	9	1.73%	2	0.91%
omen	20	2.11%	0	0.00%	1	0.19%	0	0.00%
overconfidence	3	0.32%	2	1.36%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
pain	5	0.53%	1	0.68%	9	1.73%	0	0.00%
piety	25	2.63%	1	0.68%	0	0.00%	8	3.64%
pride	21	2.21%	1	0.68%	8	1.54%	0	0.00%
protection	13	1.37%	1	0.68%	5	0.96%	1	0.45%
quest	5	0.53%	2	1.36%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
religion	127	13.38%	11	7.48%	43	8.29%	11	5.00%
revenge	9	0.95%	0	0.00%	3	0.58%	1	0.45%
sacrifice	4	0.42%	1	0.68%	2	0.39%	1	0.45%
shame	26	2.74%	2	1.36%	9	1.73%	0	0.00%
storytelling	1	0.11%	0	0.00%	1	0.19%	0	0.00%
strength	24	2.53%	8	5.44%	15	2.89%	4	1.82%
threat	22	2.32%	3	2.04%	8	1.54%	2	0.91%
tower	0	0.00%	0	0.00%	2	0.39%	0	0.00%
treachery	24	2.53%	3	2.04%	11	2.12%	4	1.82%
unconquerable	7	0.74%	3	2.04%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
violence	30	3.16%	4	2.72%	16	3.08%	11	5.00%
virtue	3	0.32%	1	0.68%	4	0.77%	2	0.91%
weakness	3	0.32%	0	0.00%	7	1.35%	0	0.00%
wisdom	4	0.42%	1	0.68%	0	0.00%	0	0.00%
Total	949	100%	147	100%	488	100%	178	100%

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) describes XML documents as "made up of storage units called entities, which contain either parsed or unparsed data. Parsed data is made up of characters, some of which form character data, and some of which form markup. Markup encodes a description of the document's storage layout and logical structure. XML provides a mechanism to impose constraints on the storage layout and logical structure." (XML 1.0)

An element, the most widely used kind of XML entity, is enclosed in angle brackets. It consists either of an opening and a closing tag enclosing some content –

<element tag="opening">This is an element.</element tag="closing">

– or of a singleton tag "closed" by a forward slash:

<singleton_element/>

Elements are allowed attributes, which function as sub-categories to the elements' categories; in the above example tag is an attribute, whose values are opening and closing. Elements can also contain other elements; however, contained elements must be wholly contained (beginning and ending tags properly nested, like concentric circles). There can be no overlapping of elements:

<sentence>This <verb>is</verb> a sentence.</sentence>

There are only a few other core rules to XML. Tags must be consistently capitalized (<name> and <Name> are different entities). Finally, XML must be well-formed: it must include a prolog (such as an XML declaration, for example <?xml version = "1.0"?>) and a root element "no part of which appears in the content of any other element" (XML 1.0) but which can, and usually does, surround all other content.

There may be one or more supplemental documents that define what elements, attributes and other entities may be used in a specific XML project, as well as where and how they may be placed. Such a document is called a DTD (Document Type Definition), or else a schema. If such a document is written and referenced in an XML file's prolog, the additional rules described in it apply to that XML file. Conformance to these rules makes the file valid. It is possible for an XML file to be well-formed but not valid if its general syntax is correct but it breaks the rules specified in the DTD or schema.

Semantic code structure

All excerpt texts and metadata, with the exception of image, video and/or sound files (stored separately), are contained in the file titled rolandht.xml. The basic encoding structure of the file (excepting information within an excerpt, for which see next section) follows; for information about XML see Appendix E.

<works>
  <work date="" geo="" lang="" name="" type="" timeperiod="">
    <header>
      <author id=""></author>
      <title id="">Song of Roland</title>
      <language></language>
      <translator></translator>
      <textnotes caption=""></textnotes>
    </header>

    <excerpt id="" title="">
      <context></context>
      <txt>(see below)</txt>
    </excerpt>
    [more excerpts, if and as needed]
  </work>
  [more works, as needed]
</works>

In conventional English, the above can be read as follows. This is a collection of excerpts from different works. Within each work are recorded the date of its creation (if known), its geographic origin, original language, name, type (prose, verse, drama), and time period (necessary for performing the statistical analysis presented in Appendix D). The author's name (if known), title and translator of the work (if any) are also noted. If general notes on the work are present, they are part of the header section. Each excerpt has a unique ID (necessary for processing for web presentation), a title, a short description of its context within the work, and the text of the excerpt itself. Each work contains one or more excerpts; the rolandht.xml document contains several works.

Semantic code structure within an excerpt

Besides the context and any structural encoding (paragraphs, line breaks for verse, etc.), an excerpt may contain the following elements60 and/or attributes:

<theme name="" who="" accused="" accuser="" charge="" realized="" simile="" metaphor="" tstart="" tend=""/>

<imagery name="" type="" realized="" magic="" called="" belongs="" whom="" simile="" metaphor="" tstart="" tend=""/>

<character name="" collective="" mention="" religion="" myth="" myth-origin="" historical="" tstart="" tend=""/>

<place name="" type="" where="" myth="" myth-origin=""/>

<speech who="" cont="" internal="" type="" according-to=""/>

<transl eng=""/>

<note/>

A theme may have: a name that appears in the middle column of the website; a who designation, which attributes a theme (for example fear) to a specific character; a realized attribute, which specifies whether the action of the theme is performed or merely discussed. If the theme is accusation, the attributes accused, accuser and charge provide more information about the accusation. There are also attributes to categorize themes as similes or metaphors; and finally, tstart and tend refer to the time signatures between which the given theme occurs in a film clip. The four latter attributes may also be present in <imagery>; tstart and tend may also occur in <character>.

Imagery has a name (accessory, sound, nature or animal) and a type (weapon, hornblow, water, lion). An accessory may have a name of its own (be called Durendal, for example); belongs to someone, but may be in someone else's possession, which is noted in whom. An image may have magic properties, and may or may not be realized (see themes above).

A character has a name and perhaps a religion. The character may be collective (the Saxons); a myth (Saint Michael) – in which case it will have a myth-origin – or historical; and finally, the character may be merely mentioned but not present in the scene.

A place has a name (Paris) and a type (city); it may be a myth (in which case it may also have a myth-origin), and it may or may not be geographically contextualized using the where attribute.

Speech has a speaker (who); may be internal, such as a character talking to himself; and may have a type (for example lament). The speech of one character may be related by another; such cases are conveyed through the according-to attribute. Finally, the cont attribute is one of convenience: it permits me to designate a single speech instance spanning more than one structural element (such as a paragraph) without violating the XML hierarchy.

Translations from the Middle English, intended as reading aids, have only one attribute – eng for "English" – which contains the translation itself. The <transl> element surrounds the word or phrase being translated.

Finally, notes are in-line annotations (which appear as quill icons in the interface, see below) that draw attention to particularly interesting semantic connections within the corpus, reference translators' interpretations of obscure geographical locations, and/or provide further contextual information.

Web interface

The web interface is explained in the help file. The PDF file linked from the top of this page, however, includes information about the web interface.

Module 1: Objective

Acquaint the student with critical and paratextual elements of Roland^HT – information about the source, general text notes, translations, in-text notes and contextual information for each excerpt.

Module 1: Assignment

Load Roland^HT in your browser. Find the excerpt titled "Forest [Battle at] Runcyvale." Answer the following queries, using the "Help" section if needed:

Module 2: Objective

Acquaint the student with a multilinear reading process guided by her own interests.

Module 2: Assignment

Load Roland^HT in your browser. Do the following: