[tei-council] facsimile odd -- what is a facsimile?

Lou Burnard lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Mon Jul 23 06:27:02 EDT 2007


Thanks Dot for your comments. If I may, I'd like to address what seem to 
be the chief issues in separate messages. I will start with the one I 
feel more strongly about than the others.

Dot Porter wrote:
> 
LB >> a) I don't think this element belongs in sourceDesc. If <pg> contains
>> the  images constituting a digital facsimile, then it isn't metadata
>> about that facsimile, it *is* the facsimile. I might want to record in
>> the sourceDesc other things (e.g. where I nicked the images from) which
>> wouldn't form part of the facsimile proper.
> 
> CT>But to my mind, the tei:pg elements ARE descriptions of the source
> CT>material. I could be misinterpreting this though, I admit.
> 
> I'm with Conal on this, I think. sourceDesc is a description of the
> source material. "Source material" could be a manuscript, a scroll, a
> gravestone, what have you. A facsimile of the source is not the same
> thing as the source - a facsimile is metadata about the source. 


The syllogism seems to be:

  * A facsimile is not the same thing as the source.
  * Metadata is not the same thing as the source.
  * Therefore A facsimile is metadata.

But of course this is a fine example of an "undistributed middle"!

One of my most prized books is the Hinman facsimile edition of the First 
Folio. This hefty volume consists of page images of the 1623 folio, with 
modern metadata (line numbering) added, modern (well, early 20th c.) 
introductory matter, title page, back matter etc. It also has its own 
metadata -- who printed it, when and where -- quite distinct from the 
information about Isaac Iaggard and others responsible for the 1623 
volume which it reproduces.  For example, like other facsimile editions, 
this one makes a fairly eclectic selection from the available surviving 
first folio sources -- it doesn't claim to reproduce any specific copy, 
but tells you which copies have been used for which pages. Even in the 
case where there is a unique original, as Andrew Prescott tells us, 
facsimiles can vary greatly in their relationship to it, and thus there 
is always some degree of description needed about the facsimile itself, 
distinct from the source it purports to represent.

In fact, it seems to me the relationship between a transcription of a 
source and the original is almost identical to the relationship between 
a facsimile of it and the original. One translates a reading letter by 
letter, and the other translates a reading dot by dot, but they are both 
readings and as such I would like to give them the same ontological 
standing in my encoding.

In addition to this philosophical argument, let us not forget that for 
every one TEI-encoded digital text out there, there are probably a 
thousand digital facsimiles. Surely the TEI ought to be offering a way 
of encoding digital facsimile editions as well as digital 
transcriptions? There are quite a few places where the TEI Header is 
used to stock metadata about both kinds of digital object. Wouldn't it 
be nice to offer a way of growing one kind into the other without doing 
violence to the basic TEI model?

If we are going to have markup which describes the page images 
themselves, as digital objects, then the set of page images constituting 
a work isa kind of "text" itself and should be treated as such. In 
short: my proposal is
a) add a new element <facsimile> (or better word if we can think of one)
b) change the content model of <TEI> and of <group> to permit 
(text|facsimile) where they currently permit <text>

Note that I am not proposing a class model.textLike because I cannot 
think of any other kind of thing that might go in there -- I'd suggest 
that talking books, if we want to digitize them, are another form of 
facsimile.



DP: I'd
> say that <pg> does belong in sourceDesc, however this doesn't mean it
> doesn't also make sense to have it at the same level as <text>.
> Perhaps it should be allowed in both places? Similar to msDescription,
> where you can have them both in the header and in the body.
> 

I can see why the "bung em in the header" policy is convenient, for 
example  in the case where you just have a few page images to illustrate 
particularly vexing parts of your manuscript, so I am ready to concede 
this as a possibility. But I still think it's Wrong with a capital R.




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