[tei-council] [Fwd: Best way to encode bibliographic references in prose text?]

Conal Tuohy conal.tuohy at vuw.ac.nz
Thu Dec 13 00:45:07 EST 2007


On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 13:24 +0000, Lou's Laptop wrote:
> This does sound plausible at first blush, but bear in mind that the 
> <title> element really does two different things. It acts as *the* title 
> inside a (unique) bibliographic description, in which situtation it 
> definitely should not be pointing to anything else, 

Couldn't much the same be said in respect of e.g. <persName> (where it
appears within <person>)?

> and it is also used 
> to say of some string that it's a title without necessarily linking it 
> to anything in particular. 

Again, the same applies to <name>, <persName>, <geogName>, etc. 

How is <title> different?

> The element for linking a string to something 
> else, as Conal points out in his eminently sensible reply on tei-l, is 
> <ref>.

I don't think this what Markus has in mind (though I'm not 100% sure),
but speaking for myself, I wasn't really wanting to treat the <title> as
a direct reference to a information resource (e.g. an encoding of the
cited work) but only to unambiguously identify the work which the
<title> names. Does that put a different light on it?

Clearly a <title> is a name of a thing, and I think to be consistent we
should treat it like other kinds of names, where we've allowed encoders
to identify precisely which thing is named, by reference to an entry in
an authority file or similar (using @key or @ref). Adding <title> to
att.naming would allow that.

I guess <lang> is a similar case.

While I'm at it, I think I've spotted another small modelling error
relating to names. It seems to me that att.personal should not be a
member of att.naming, because this allows nameLink to be used with @key
or @ref as an identifier for a person, something which seems highly
improbable to me, to say the least.

Because nameLink is a member of att.naming (via att.personal), it can
have a @ref or @key to identify the entity being named by the nameLink -
yet nameLink is not in fact a name. 

"<nameLink> contains a connecting phrase or link used within a name but
not regarded as part of it, such as van der or of."
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-nameLink.html

For example, this is valid, but, I submit, nonsensical:

<persName>
 <forename>Frederick</forename>
 <nameLink key="frederick.van-der.tronk">van der</nameLink>
 <surname>Tronck</surname>
</persName>

This glitch can be resolved by removing att.personal from att.naming,
and instead explicitly including in att.naming every member of
model.persNamePart EXCEPT nameLink.

I also wonder whether persName itself needs @sort?
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.personal.html

Regards

Conal

(sticking my oar in while I'm still an official Council member ;-)

-- 
Conal Tuohy
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
www.nzetc.org



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