[tei-council] regularizing names

[Christian Wittern]

(I have not seen John's post -- did it go to the list?)

Julia Flanders <Julia_Flanders at brown.edu> writes:

> I think you're right that this overlaps conceptually with key=, and I
> pondered this a bit yesterday. It seems to me that the distinction
> between key= and reg= is still that key= is a way of taking you to
> information about a person, and reg= is a way of providing (or taking
> you to) information about a name. In the situations Perry is
> envisioning, where name authority records are the source of
> information about the name, they also happen to provide that
> information by providing information about a person. But this is
> incidental, and might not always be the case.

But in cases where this is the case, it would be bothersome to have to
provide both.  We might need a mechanism that allows some control over
how to handle such cases.

>>And perhaps the guidelines should also discuss the option of pointing to an
>>external file dedicated to name regularizations.  For instance, if my project
>>consists of hundreds of commentaries on Romantic poetry, I don't need to repeat
>><regName authority="LCNAF" id="byron" >Byron, George Gordon Byron,
>>Baron</regName> in every document.  Rather, I could do something like this:
>>"...the dastardly and poisonous malignity of <persName
>>reg="myRegNames.xml#byron">Byron's</persName> most foul and treacherous
>>libel...," pointing to a master myRegNames.xml file.  Of course, this latter
>>approach has some potential overlap with the functionality of @key, if one
>>accepts that the key can be an id in an XML file as well as it could be a id in
>>a database.  But then the TEI is all about choices :-), so I don't see this as a
>>problem.

We do have a similar case (of referencing information from the text to
information in the header) with the socalled Gaiji module, where a list
of character description occurs in the Header, but one might in the
same way want to keep them in a separate file for collections.  There
are two (?) possibilities for this I can think of at the moment, 

* hardcode the reference like in  John's example above:
  <persName>reg="myRegNames.xml#byron">Byron's</persName>

* use bar pointers to the header and dereference from there, probably
  using XInclude:
  <persName>reg="#byron">Byron's</persName>

  and in the header:
  <profileDesc>
    <xi:include href="myRegnames.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>
  ...

Of course, this is all up to the encoder, but we might want to include
an example that demonstrates this.

All the best,

Christian

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