[tei-council] handy...

[Daniel O'Donnell]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 21:11 -0400, Syd Bauman wrote:
> 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.

I mentioned this a while ago.

> 
> 
> > @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.
> 
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Department Chair and Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox +1 403 329-2377
Fax +1 403 382-7191
Email: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
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