[tei-council] handy...

[Syd Bauman]

My quick reaction is that it's a real shame we didn't address this
earlier (a lot earlier -- measured in years), but given the current
state of affairs, I think I agree with most all of Lou's suggestions,
and Arriana's att.handWriting. And I even like <handNote>'s scope=
more than <hand>'s first=.

One question, though. Why name the wrapper element <handDesc> instead
of <listHand>? (The answer, of course, is to maintain the parallelism
with the other xxxDesc stuff in MS; so what I'm wondering is which
parallelism is more important to keep?)

When we created @scribe of <handNote> we didn't have personography.
Now that we do, I don't wonder if it should be a pointer to a
<person> or <nym>. I realize that for many, many (perhaps the vast
majority) of manuscripts the details of the scribe can never be
known. But certainly for some of the manuscripts (e.g., those Matthew
spoke about in Victoria a few months ago) the scribe *is* known.


> @writing "describes other characteristics of the hand" e,g,
> "shaky", "thick",. There seems no advantage to giving such
> descriptive notes in an attribute.

The advantage is that it is data.enumerated, and users can create
their own controlled vocabulary. I don't know if this is much of an
advantage in manuscript description, though. My instinct is to keep
this one, saying that simple controlled descriptions can be provided
on the attribute, and detailed prose descriptions may be provided as
content. However I'd be happy to have the manuscripters say "nah, not
really useful" and nuke it.



> The easiest solution (proposed, I think, by Matthew some time ago)
> would be simply to abolish <handList> and <hand> completely, since
> they duplicate the function of <handDesc> and <handNote>. We could
> permit <handDesc> within <profileDesc> for those who don't want to
> go through the business of doing a full msDesc just to document
> some hands (though it's hard to imagine why you'd want one without
> the other).
> 
> If you've forgotten, the only difference between <hand> and
> <handNote> is that the former is empty, while the latter has para
> content. And <hand> has attributes
>   @scribe,    @style   @ink  @first  @writing   @mainLang  @resp
> while
> <handNote> has attributes
>  @scribe
>  @script  [means same as hand at style]
>  @medium [means same as hand at ink]
>  @scope  [generalizes on hand at first]
> 
> Arianna proposes making a new class, att.handWriting, to contain
> these four, which seems useful, even if we abolish <hand>, since
> those who want to can then extend it.
> 
> The three attributes on <hand> but not <handNote> are probably
> dispensable: @writing "describes other characteristics of the hand"
> e,g, "shaky", "thick",. There seems no advantage to giving such
> descriptive notes in an attribute. @mainLang is not a property of
> the hand. @resp could be inherited from att.editLike, if needed,
> but it seems odd to single out identification of the hand from
> other aspects of ms description. I think these attributes are there
> because <hand> is empty, so there was a need to pack a lot of extra
> info into it. If we replaced <hand> by <handNote>, then any such
> extra info could appear as content of the element.