[tei-council] tei stemma model

Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula at kcl.ac.uk
Fri Jul 20 05:37:32 EDT 2007



David J Birnbaum wrote:
> For what it's worth, I chose "contaminates" (verb) rather than 
> "contamination" because I thought the former made the directionality 
> clear. That is, if a parent contains a <contaminates> element, it 
> suggests that the parent is the contaminator. If it contains a 
> <contamination> element, it leaves open whether it is the contaminator 
> or the contaminatee. This isn't a major problem (the @target attribute 
> disambiguates in any case), but I tend to forget the names I assign to 
> objects, so I try to make them as mnemonic and self-explanatory as I can.

This is like a special case of a <relation> element, isn't it - expect 
it cannot have @mutual - ?

<relation
    type="type of contamination"
    name="contamination"
    active="#γ"
    passive="#A"/>

By the way, I have enjoyed reading this proposal. It is elegant and has 
a very well exemplified concrete application.
To be honest though I don't know enough about the chapter where it 
should be integrated into...so I don't have very useful comments.

Arianna
> 
>> Should then eTree leaf nodes also have their own <label> elements if the
>> user is not pointing back with @corresp to some msDescription (or 
>> similar)?
>>   
> 
> What I liked about your use of <label> is that we may want to label a 
> node both individually and as a branch in the tradition. As I wrote 
> earlier, I tend to use the same term for both, but one might reasonably 
> want to refer to, say, beta as the "northern branch" of the tradition 
> and gamma as the "southern branch," so that ones need to label a node 
> both "beta" and "northern branch." In this case one could dereference a 
> @corresp (or use an @n in just this limited function; it is, after all, 
> a global TEI attribute, although its use in this textual function might 
> represent an unacceptable retreat from the War on Attributes) to get the 
> siglum but use <label> for something prosier and more usefully 
> descriptive. I don't see any particular need for <label> elements on 
> leaf nodes as long as we can get their identifiers by dereferencing 
> @corresp or through @n, but I see no reason to prohibit it. If I 
> remember correctly, <eTree> can always contain <label>. We should 
> probably advise users on how they should distinguish among all these 
> labeling mechanisms, though, so that we don't up leaving people 
> uncertain about which strategy they should use to map a name to a node.
> 
>>> One possible additional cost (on top of
>>> general parsimony and reduced opportunity for error with my model, which
>>> I mentioned earlier) is that users may need to draw a stemma where they
>>> do not have corresponding <msDescription> elements elsewhere. Since your
>>> model doesn't record the sigla in the stemma itself, it requires that
>>> users record them elsewhere, even when an <msDescription> (or witness
>>> list or something similar) may otherwise not be needed, so that the
>>> indirection and additional markup may be required not by the
>>> informational goals of the author, but by the construction of the
>>> schema.
>>>     
>>
>> What if they nest <label> element for those?  So:
>>
>> <eTree corresp="#msabc123" type="hypothetical">
>> (...)
>>   <eTree corresp="msY" type="hypothetical">
>>     <label>Group Wibble</label>
>>     <contaminates targets="#nodeA"/>
>>     <eTree corresp="#msI" type="extant"><label>Manuscript 
>> I</label></eTree>
>>     <eTree corresp="#msX" type="extant"><label>Manuscript 
>> X</label></eTree>
>>   </eTree>
>> </eTree>
>>
>> ?
>>
>>   
> 
> This should work, although it may cause confusion about how one labels 
> an intermediary node that has both its own name and the name of a branch 
> of the tradition. I've been advocating @n, but, of course, that means 
> putting character data into an attribute value, which is something that 
> we try not to do.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> David
> 
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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



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