[Julia Flanders <Julia_Flanders at Brown.edu>] Re: Documents to be reviewed before Council call on March 30

[Christian Wittern]

Dear council members,

Following is a proposal for a new working group to be charged by the
TEI.  Please read through it and consider it, I will put a discussion
of this on the agenda for the next conference call.

All the best,

Christian

<p>

<strong>attached mail follows:</strong><hr noshade>


Dear Christian,

I am writing not as a member of the council but as a member of a 
group submitting a proposal for a TEI workgroup. We've prepared a 
proposal (below) which we would like to ask the Council to consider.

Proposal for a TEI workgroup on physical bibliography

It has been well understood since the publication of P3 that the TEI 
Guidelines do not provide for a detailed encoding of physical 
bibliographical description. There has been an acknowledged need for 
coverage of this topic for over a decade. We would like to propose a 
workgroup to create an encoding specification for capturing certain 
physical bibliographical details in a structured form.

In discussions of encoding information about physical documents, 
there have been two basic strands:

--those who are interested in the physical document very broadly: 
details of binding, description of materials, description of page 
layout and graphic elements, and other kinds of "bibliographic codes" 
(to use Jerome McGann's now well-known term).

--those who are interested in particular details of physical 
bibliography that are essential for certain types of bibliographical 
analysis, for example those focusing on the structure of the book 
(its collation and binding) and the reconstruction of the printing 
surfaces from which the book was created.

The former community agrees that details of the physical document are 
crucial--both theoretically and in practice--for an adequate digital 
account of the physical object, but no consensus has emerged about 
what features need capturing, what descriptive vocabulary would best 
describe them, or what analytical processes or research might be 
facilitated once the information was encoded.

The latter community, however, represents a long tradition (nearly a 
century) of well-codified bibliographical research that has produced 
a vocabulary, a formalism, and a methodology for bibliographic 
description and analysis. The research questions that engage this 
community could clearly be furthered by the availability of 
well-encoded data representing the necessary information. A set of 
consistent guidelines for capturing this information within TEI 
documents would be a necessary first step in enabling this type of 
research.

We feel that the latter strand can be separated without disadvantage 
from the former, since its boundaries are comparatively clear and its 
needs are not difficult to address. The former strand is also 
important, but requires a larger and lengthier effort even to define 
its constituency, their needs, and the best way of addressing them.

We would therefore like to propose a workgroup to develop a TEI 
encoding scheme to encode details of physical bibliographical 
information, including:

--identification of the gathering, leaf, and side for each physical page
--description of methods for using <join> to derive higher-order 
structures from this basic information (e.g. to reconstruct a given 
bifolium or forme or sheet of paper from a set of individual pages)
--summary elements for inclusion in the TEI header which would 
provide a formalized description of the entire book and its collation 
structure.

The proposed members of this workgroup are:

Terry Catapano (Chair), Columbia University
Julia Flanders, Brown University
Richard Noble, Brown University
David Gants, University of New Brunswick
Edward Vanhoutte, Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies
[Shef Rogers, University of Otago; still pending acceptance]

We anticipate that all of the necessary work can be accomplished via 
email and telephone, and thus will not require any face-to-face 
meetings. A small budget for conference calls ($250) would suffice.

If the Council approves this workgroup, we expect to complete this 
work by fall 2004. Depending on the timing of P5, it might be ready 
for inclusion in P5 if appropriate; if not, it could be included in 
P6.

Comments and recommendations are welcome.






-- 

 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN