[tei-council] facsimile

Conal Tuohy conal.tuohy at vuw.ac.nz
Mon Aug 27 00:11:32 EDT 2007


On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 00:01 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> staring at the correspondence, I tried to make sense of it by converting
> some of my own work.  I find a situation where I have a record of
> a facsimile, but not an image of it.  That is to say, I know the
> catalogue number of the photograph, but don't have a JPEG.
> 
> Do people think I should be using some other markup
> entirely, or using <facsimile> in some way? 

I think that much of the facsimile markup could still be useful, even in
the absence of any facsimile images. If you use it to encode the
position of pieces of text on the page, then you can use that
information to produce a "print facsimile". As an example, you may
remember the HTML "print facsimile" I showed off in Berlin. This demo
took the coordinates expressed in the TEI markup, and transformed them
to CSS attributes to precisely position the HTML elements on a web page.

But if you don't have a digital image to hand, chances are that you also
won't have established the coordinates of the textual elements anyway (I
imagine).

If you don't have digital images or coordinates, then I think the only
advantage you'd get from using <facsimile> is being able to associate
individual pages with their surrogate images (I don't think you can do
this with <surrogates>). On the other hand, <surrogates> allows for the
use of <bibl> to point to the surrogates, whereas with
facsimile/surface/zone/graphic you only have a @url attribute. I don't
know if you'd be able to sensibly wedge your catalogue numbers into @url
attributes (perhaps using "info" URLs? or OpenURL?).

> I know msdesc
> has its <surrogates>, but as usual that's so bound up in
> over-specific manuscript language I want to steer clear of it....
> 
-- 
Conal Tuohy
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
www.nzetc.org




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