[tei-council] Report on Vilnius meeting

Fri Mar 23 12:51:07 EST 2007

I think we were supposed to comments on Matthew's draft about additions 
to Places and Names and Nyms by giving some encoding examples today.

I would have like to have had the time to do this more extensively, but 
here are my examples/comments for places for now and, even more briefly, 
for <gi>nym</gi>.

*Places: examples*

An example of hierarchy among places expressed by using only nesting and 
not <gi>relation</gi> and variants of place names (I suppose that this 
could be expressed better using <nym> now):

<place xml:id="wales" type="country">
   <placeName xml:lang="la">Wales</placeName>
   <placeName xml:lang="la">Wallie</placeName>
   <placeName xml:lang="la">Wallia</placeName>
   <placeName xml:lang="la">Wall</placeName>
   <placeName xml:lang="fro">Le Waleis</placeName>
   <place xml:id="carmarthenshire" type="county" notBefore="1284">
     <placeName xml:lang="en">Carmarthenshire</placeName>
     <place xml:id="carmarthen">
       <placeName xml:lang="en">Carmarthen</placeName>
       <placeName xml:lang="la" notBefore="1090" 
notAfter="1300">Kaermerdin</placeName>
       <placeName xml:lang="cy">Caerfyrddin</placeName>
       <place xml:id="carmarthen_castle" type="castle">
         <settlment>castle of Carmarthen</settlment>
       </place>
     </place>
   </place>
</place>

An example of a place that is unidentified, but that may be in Wales:

<place xml:id="hendy" type="unidentified">
    <placeName xml:lang="en">Hendy</placeName>
    ...?
     <relation name="geogPart" active="#wales" passive="#hendy" 
cert="high"/>
    ...?
</place>

If I wanted to encode that the person Ranulf de Blundeville has been 
earl of Chester, how would I encode this within the place tag for 
Chester? as a placeEvent?

e.g.
<place xml:id="chester">
...
  <placeEvent type="political">
   <personName key="blundeville_de_ranulf">Ranulf de 
Blundeville</personName> was earl of Chester <date from="1118" 
to="1132">from 1118 to 1132</date>.
  </placeEvent>
...
</place>

Indeed, I wouldn't mind to use <gi>placeEvent</gi> for this type of 
information, but its description would then need to be expanded and say 
that it could be used for facts involving a place actively as well as 
passively (well...relatively passively, since the place is actually 
"witnessing" a fact here).

*Places: comments*

Prose errors:
There are some errors related to missing words, punctuation etc., but 
given the state of the draft I don't think it's necessary to report on 
this at this stage and, in any case, no to the entire list.

Reification of <gi>placeName</gi>:
I find a bit confusing the use of the <att>type</att> attribute for the 
<gi>placeName</gi> vs. <gi>place</gi> in the given examples.

e.g.
<placeName type="building">Brasserie George</placeName>

Shouldn't this be <att>type</att> of the <gi>place</gi> element instead?

Same for the use of <gi>bloc</gi> within <gi>placeName</gi> in another 
example.

Place Description:
<gi>placeDesc</gi> is not described.

*Nym general*

I think this addition has lots of potential uses.
The segmentation of a person surname into components which are, for 
instance, toponymics and therefore place names in its own right could be 
one of these. I could also see a possible combination between the use of 
<gi>nym</gy> and relations between person names for patronymics or similar.
So, for now, thanks to the people who have worked on this in Vilnius.

Arianna
-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cch

Matthew James Driscoll wrote:
> TEI Place-name meeting, Vilnius, 23-24 February
> 
> In attendance were: Lou Burnard, Matthew Driscoll, Øyvind Eide, Richard
> Light, Tadeusz Piotrowski, Tatjana Timchenko and Sebastian Rahtz.
> 
> The first day we were at the Institute of Lithuanian language
> (http://www.lki.lt/indexeng.php), part of the Lithuanian Academy of
> Sciences, and on the second day the Faculty of Philology
> (http://www.flf.vu.lt/) at Vilnius University; we are grateful to both
> institutions for acting as hosts.
> 
> 1. Names and nyms
> 
> We began by tackling one bit of business outstanding from the Personography
> meeting last year in Oxford, viz. the development of a mechanism for
> pointing from actual name instances to the canonical form of that name, thus
> addressing the needs of onomasticians (who are interested in names per se),
> in addition to those of prosopographers (who are interested in people). If,
> for example, the names Tony Blair and Tony Benn occur in a text it should be
> possible to tag them in such a way that they both point to information about
> these respective gentlemen and are flagged as instances of the name "Tony".
> It should further be possible to indicate that "Tony" is a (pet-)form of
> "Anthony", which is itself a member of a family of names containing forms
> such as "Antonio", "Anton", "Antoine" and so on. We propose doing this by
> means of a new element, called <nym>, which contains the definition for a
> canonical name or name-part of any kind. In addition to global attributes
> and those inherited from att.typed it can take a @parts attribute, which
> points to constituent nyms. The attribute @nymKey is available on any
> element which is a member of the att.naming class in order to point to the
> nym with which it corresponds. Thus, to take our example, the name "Tony
> Blair" in running prose could be tagged as follows:
> 
> <persName key="#ACLB">
>     <forename nymKey="#ANT1.1.1">Tony</forename>
>     <surname>Blair</surname>
> </persName>
> 
> The @key attribute on <persName> would point to a <person> element giving
> information about Tony Blair, while @nymKey on <forename> points to the
> relevant <nym>. A <nym> element may also combine a number of other <nym>
> elements together, where it is intended to show that one is a pet form or
> diminutive of another, or that different nyms are to be regarded as variants
> of the same base nym, using the <form> element (from the model.entryParts
> class); orthographic variants are dealt with using <orth>, while <etym> can
> be used for information on the origin of the name:
> 
> <listNym>
>     <nym type="base" xml:id="ANT1">
>         <form xml:lang="la">Antonius</form>
>         <etym>From the Roman family name <mentioned>Antonius</mentioned>,
> which is of unknown, presumably <lang>Etruscan</lang>, origin. It has been
> commonly, but incorrectly, associated with <lang>Greek</lang> <mentioned
> xml:lang="gr">&#x03B1;&#x03BD;&#x03B8;&#x03BF;&#x03C2;</mentioned>
> <gloss>flower</gloss>, which resulted in spellings with th in some
> languages.</etym>
>         <nym type="lingVar" xml:id="ANT1.1">
>             <form xml:lang="en">
>                 <orth>Anthony</orth>
>                 <orth>Antony</orth>
>             </form>
>             <nym type="dim" xml:id="ANT1.1.1">
>                 <form xml:lang="en">Tony</form>
>             </nym>
>         </nym>
>         <nym type="lingVar" xml:id="ANT1.2">
>             <form xml:lang="it">Antonio</form>
>             <nym type="dim" xml:id="ANT1.2.1">
>                 <form xml:lang="en">Tonio</form>
>             </nym>
>         </nym>
>         <!-- other variants of Antonius -->
>     </nym>
>     <!-- other nyms -->
> </listNym>
> 
> 
> This mechanism could also be used for place-names and place-name elements
> (e.g. thorp, caster).
> 
> 2. Place-names
> 
> Our principal task at this meeting was to develop mechanisms for encoding
> place-names, analogous to those which were developed for personal names at
> the meeting in Oxford last year, which would allow for the recording of
> abstracted information about a place, such as map coordinate, GIS
> information etc., as well as variant forms of the name, in different
> languages (e.g. Praha, Prague, Praga) and/or different forms over time (e.g.
> Lundunum, London). On the analogy with <person>, we propose a <place>
> element, which will usually contain at least one, and possibly several,
> <placeName> elements, followed by one or more <location> elements to provide
> geographical and/or geo-political information about the location of the
> place. The existing <locale> element is available to provide a brief
> informal description of the nature of a place. In addition, three new
> elements have been proposed: <placeTrait>, <placeState> and <placeEvent>,
> which all have similar content models to their counterparts within <person>.
> 
> To take a fairly simple example:
> 
> <place xml:id="IS">
>     <placeName xml:lang="en">Iceland</placeName>
>     <placeName xml:lang="is">Ísland</placeName>
>     <location type="lat-long">65 00 N, 18 00 W</location>
>     <placeTrait type="area">103,000 sq km</placeTrait>
>     <placeState type="gov" notBefore="1944">Constitutional
> republic</placeState>
>     <placeEvent type="political">Previously part of the kingdom of
> <placeName key="#DK">Denmark</placeName>, Iceland became independent
> on <date value="1944-06-17">17 June 1944</date>.</placeEvent>
> </place>
> 
> 
> 3. Events
> 
> There was also some discussion on the feasibility (and desirability) of
> developing a generic tagset for encoding assertions about events, although
> no real conclusion was reached.
> 
> M. J. Driscoll
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-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cch