[tei-council] Witness proposal
Lou Burnard
lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Wed Mar 21 18:22:05 EST 2007
In early november last year, Gautier Poupeau whom several of you will
recall from his presentation at the Members meeting, sent me a document
outlining a proposal to address the inconsistency currently subsisting
in the Guidelines about how manuscript (or print) witnesses should be
documented. I owe him, and the Council, a major apology for having not
done anything with it -- it simply got mislaid and then forgotten.
Fortunately, he's a persevering kind of chap, and I have now recovered
the draft and placed it somewhere you can see it, viz:
http://www.tei-c.org/Drafts/witnessPart/proposal-witness.xml
It's in French, so I will summarize briefly the proposal here (I will
also translate the document fully if so requested)
* create a new class called model.witnessPart. which is a subclass of
model.phrasel; use this class in the content model of <witness>
* add to this class a number of elements currently specific to
msDescription, specifically:
origDate, material, physDesc, seal, dimensions,
filiation,msIdentifier, msContents, rubric;
* re-introduce the "sigil" attribute as a new <sigil> element
* add a "class" attribute to <witness>
The suggestion is based on Gautier's extensive experience in adapting
TEI to the description of cartularies and similar documents, with due
regard to practice in German, Italian, and French collections.
I think the work is sufficiently straightforward to do quite quickly
(i.e. it can be done for P5); I also suspect that it would be a very
smart political move to be seen to be doing something in this area.
Initial comments?
(It occurs to me also that this might be something the newly revived mss
SIG would like to kick around -- but that could happen independently of
plumbing his suggestion into P5)
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