[tei-council] personography strawman proposal from LB, MJD, SR

[Sebastian Rahtz]

We suggest that a full-scale work group starting now from first
principles is not the best use of time or money.
A lot of work has already been done in this area, by a number of
different people, many of them using TEI with a few minor variations. It
seems then that what is needed would be more a clear statement of best
practice than  a  radically new set of TEI tags.

We propose work in 3 stages:

1. clearing up TEI P5 to add a few obviously missing elements (<death>, 
<listPerson>)
and attributes  (generalising and simplifying ways of approximate dating 
for example),
and testing that P5 then covers a realistic quantity of existing person 
data.
Drafting a new section for P5  to describe this revised material (much
of it is already present in P5, but in the Corpus chapter).

2. investigating in a systematic way other existing schemata to see how 
they handle
person data and how their feature sets compare to those of what we have 
in P5.
This would aim to produce a kind of "cross-walk" of existing person data
schemata and some sample data sets.

3. organize a workgroup meeting to review the outputs from the first two
stages and  to develop the TEI recommendation.

Stage 1 has been largely completed already (it finished late last night;
P5 now adequately describes MJD's large set of person data, and my 
gravestone material).
For Stage 2, we suggest that part of the funds allocated to this area be 
used to fund
a student researcher in Copenhagen for  5 days work under the 
supervision of MJD.
For Stage 3, we propose that MJD be asked to convene a workgroup which 
will be funded to
meet once in the early spring, report to the Council in May, and 
conclude by the summer.

Work group objectives:
* review the TEI elements which are used to describe people, including
   where necessary those relating to place and date, and integrate them 
into a new module.

* review TEI customizations (eg Epidoc and the other classical 
archaeology work)
  which deal with people and work with their
  authors to incorporate any useful additions into the TEI core.

* investigate other encoding schemes which cover historical persons (eg 
HEML)
   and make recommendations on how the TEI scheme should relate to them.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

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