[tei-council] witList/Group query
James Cummings
James.Cummings at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Mon May 21 07:02:22 EDT 2007
Lou Burnard wrote:
> Thanks Daniel, but this does not address the question. By "overlapping"
> I did not mean "containing". Let me rephrase the question: if to witness
> A is allocated to witGroup sigma, does that always preclude it
> simultaneously being allocated to witGroup delta? I have modified the
> text on the assumption that it does, but would just like to check that
> that is indeed the case. (The former state of affairs, using the
> attribute @included, did not enforce such a rule, of course)
I'm not sure, I suppose it makes sense that at any one time a witness is
part of a particular witGroup and that precludes it being part of any other
(non-ancestor) witGroup. But I'm not confident enough in that to say that
it always precludes it. I view these groupings as possibly very fluid and
dependent on future analysis of the apparatus in the document instance.
> More significantly, looking at this again, I really want to know why we
> need this element <witness> at all. Why isn't it a (possibly
> abbreviated) <msDesc>?
That is the problem, I believe that Dot and I had with Gautier's proposed
revisions, most of what he wanted to do, I believe, could be done in an
msDesc. But, the short answer being, I suppose, that msDesc is for
manuscripts, and not all witnesses are manuscripts. Thus, some people
might feel it is semantically inaccurate to use msDesc for other
text-bearing objects which witness the same text as some manuscripts.
-James
--
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk
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