[tei-council] state of physical bibliography WG

[Christian Wittern]

Dear Council members,

As promised during yesterdays call, here is the message that came in
from Murray.

<quote>
Julia, your message is timely. With the undergraduate term over, I am
about to e-mail the current members with a report on the progress of
my researches over the last few weeks and to suggest a plan of action.

For whatever reason, the current membership of the workgroup seems to
be such that forward progress in this workgroup will ultimately happen
because of the chair's own initiatives--some members even ignored my
request for information about their interest in continuing the work of
the group. I definitely will be recruiting further members, in part in
an attempt to change this climate; in particular, I am hoping to get
Elizabeth Solopova (who works with manuscript cataloguing at the
Bodleian) and Bettina Wagner (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Muenchen,
description of incunabula) to join. Much of my own work over the fall
has been directed to assessing the feasability of the initial plans,
as the workgroup (i.e. principally you) clarified those to me during
the summer.

There are two main problems I see with those initial plans: a) an
encoding that can be induced (with no or little transformation) to
spit out in print a Bowers-like collation formula (a stated goal in
discussion in summer) may be incompatible with an encoding that allows
a full and explicit encoding of the physical facts of the printed book
(an implicit goal of all discussion so far), because Bowers depends on
various kinds of implicit  representation throughout (I will elaborate
on this  in discussion with the workgroup); and b) Bowers-like
collation formalae are not entirely compatible with the collation
symbolism commonly applied to medieval manuscripts and incunabulae
(primarily because Bowers depends on regular sequences of signings,
which are generally absent in MSS) and only partially compatible with
the collational formulae used outside of the English-speaking world.

Two alternatives are therefore presented: to consider that what we
want to encode is a Bowers (or other) formula, let the norms of the
particular sub-discipline or research culture govern its arrangement,
and throw up our hands about the direct physical description of the
document (in which case a simple <formula> tag with allowance for the
kinds of typographical representations that people use is all that is
needed); or to decide that what we really want to do is encode the
physical structure of the book, manuscript, etc. (in which case an
encoding of a certain degree of generality (higher than Bowers
formulas) and explicitness (higher than Bowers formulas) is
required). I think the latter has more chance of being useful to more
people over a longer time and will be arguing for that route, and also
for the addition of members who can speak to usages outside of the
English-speaking of book describers who deal with letterpress books
after 1700.

That's where things stand right now, Christian.

Murray McGillivray

</quote>

All the best,

Christian


-- 

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