[tei-council] Reviews of ms-chapter

Fri Jul 8 09:01:17 EDT 2005

Bedre sent end aldrig, as we say. Some comments on the 
reviews of the msDescription chapter. A much more detailed 
report will follow.

Reviews, varying in their usefulness, are in from:
1. Dorothy (Dot) Porter, working with Ben Withers, 
professor in Art History, University of Kentucky, who is 
producing an electronic edition of BL Claudius B. iv.
2. Elizabeth Solopova at the Bodleian
3. Torsten Schassan of the Herzog August Bibliothek in 
Wolfenbüttel
4. Jindrich Marek of the National Library of the Czech 
Republic
5. Gautier Poupeau of the Sorbonne

People who promised reviews but have not delivered them 
are:
Daniel O'Donnell, University of Lethbridge
Fotis Jannidis, Darmstadt (who had in fact previously sent 
fairly detailed comments on the first draft of the chapter)

I have also received comments from Consuelo Dutschke, 
Columbia University Library; the currently available draft 
has in fact been amended to take these into account.

On the whole, the reviews point out a lot of small things 
which are in need fixing, many owing to the nature of the 
ODD system (such as statements in the specifications that 
elements have no attributes other than global and inherited 
ones, when according to the surrounding prose in fact they 
do, and descriptions of standard TEI elements or attributes 
which are inappropriate to manuscripts), but nobody's 
pointed out any major problems/lacks. This I suppose is a 
good thing, since it suggests that we've actually got it 
right. Some classic problems turned up, such as the 
(alleged) inflexibility of the system when dealing with 
legacy data. There were also a number of comments which 
were simply wrong (people saying that you couldn't do 
things you perfectly well can), but which indicate that the 
documentation needs to be better.

One problem which was mentioned by several people has to do 
with the change of <msHeading> to the standard TEI element 
<head>, one result of which is that it is no longer 
possible to use <textLang> to indicate the language of the 
manuscript as a whole (<textLang> is allowed within 
individual <msItem> elements but is not, unlike 
<origPlace>, <origdate> and <title>, phrase-level). There 
is, of course, nothing to stop you simply writing "Latin 
with some French" in your <head> element, but for search 
purposes and so on people want to tag these things. One 
solution that occurs to me is to have the relevant 
attributes from <textLang>, viz. langKey and otherLangs, on 
<msContents>; this could even be a class (textLang?). 
Another is to make <textLang> phrase-level. Doing either of 
these would also allow one to encode the languages of the 
manuscript even if one used the <p> option inside 
<msContents>, as requested by ES. The inability to have 
<author> in <head> was also mentioned.

MJD