[tei-council] SV: Witness proposal

[Dot Porter]

Hi Matthew and council,

On 3/22/07, Matthew James Driscoll <mjd at hum.ku.dk> wrote:
> In terms of revamping <witness>, which was never a terribly sophisticated
> element, this proposal makes perfect sense. It is not clear to me, however,
> whether the newly redefined <witness> element is intended as an alternative
> to <msDescription> or whether there are situations in which one would use
> both. Neither appeals much to me, I must say, especially as I can't see that
> what is being proposed can't be done with <msDescription> as it is.

This is my concern as well. Since I can't read French, I was hoping
that the proposal includes some reasoning for basically placing
<msDescription> in <witness>, rather just using <msDescription>
(multiple instances, if need be) and linking them to the <witness>es.

Thanks,
Dot

The
> original idea behind <msDescription>, in any case, was very much that it
> should be able to be used for more than just cataloguing (our insistence on
> this was what led to the bulk of the disagreements with "TEI-MMSS"), and it
> was indeed my understanding that <witList> and <witness> were now to be
> deprecated as redundant. If there are things which Gautier, representing
> German, Italian and French practice, genuinely can't do using the current
> <msDescription> mechanism it would be far more useful, it seems to me, for
> us to try and adapt the existing mechanism, rather than coming up with a
> parallel one.
>
> Looking at his proposal, the chief lack seems to be a means of indicating
> the sigla, for which he proposes a new <sigil> element; these can easily
> appear within <msIdentifier> as <altIdentifier>, which takes a type
> attribute. Otherwise the elements are largely from the <msDescription>
> module, suggesting that perhaps we aren't so far off the mark after all.
>
> Matthew
>
>
>
>
> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra: Lou Burnard [mailto:lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk]
> Sendt: 22 March 2007 00:22
> Til: Matthew James Driscoll; TEI Council; gotpoupeau at infonie.fr
> Emne: Witness proposal
>
> 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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>


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Dot Porter, University of Kentucky
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Program Coordinator
Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities
dporter at uky.edu          859-257-9549
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Editorial Assistant, REVEAL Project
Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments
porter at vis.uky.edu
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