[tei-council] PB WG report

[Christian Wittern]

Council members,

this report came just in:

From: Murray McGillivray <mmcgilli at ucalgary.ca>
Subject: Re: PB Workgroup progress?
To: Christian Wittern <wittern at kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 11:55:16 -0600

HI, Christian, hope this is not too late. (I'll also try to get
something along the lines you suggest together for the face-to-face in
May.)

The PB workgroup has been examining two general approaches to
describing the structure (collation, especially) of printed books and
manuscripts, both intended roughly for "sourceDesc" in the TEI header,
the one allowing the recording of various kinds of collation formulae
varying from strict Bowers to Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, the
other providing for a more explicit encoding of book facts using more
XML-native structures . Likely both will be provided as options for
users since the strengths are quite different and transformation
between them is not elementary. Various test applications to real or
imaginary physical books have been made of both.

More recently, we have been looking at the problem of physical book
hierarchies (gatherings, leaves, pages, pre-folding sheets, etc.) and
how those can interact with existing TEI hierarchies such as of  "p"
and "div" elements in the "text" (as opposed to "sourceDesc").The
general solution  will likely involve two levels of recording of PB
facts, one where book-structure is the dominant hierarchy within
"text", and one using a kind (_which_ kind a current question) of
stand-off markup to coordinate page-starts (as milestone-like tags,
though they may turn out to have content of their own) and possibly
other events with the more explicit encoding (in "sourceDesc")
mentioned above.

Murray

Christian Wittern wrote:

>Dear Murray,
>
>Spring has come and it is again time for a short brief on the WG process.
>
>The Council will hold another teleconference next week.  I would
>appreciate if you could give me a short update on the recent progress
>of the work you made within the PB workgroup, including any problems
>you had or questions you would like to ask the council members.
>
>We will also have a face to face meeting of the Council in Mid-May.  I
>wonder if you could give us a bit more substantial information for
>that occasion to consider.  I looked at your examples on the website
>and thought some descriptive prose would help understand what you are
>doing.
>
>All the best,
>
>Christian



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