[tei-council] the pdf guidelines, a battle not a war

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> I have updated http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/Guidelines.pdf
> to do the citation for examples better, and fix an
> indexing problem

I don't know if I'm just being overly pedantic (what, who, me?) but are we 
being presentationally dishonest in providing a full citation after an example?

If I see a big shaded block quote, and underneath it I see:

Shields, David. Dead Languages, HarperCollins Canada/Perennial Rack, rpt. 
1990, p.10.

Then what that means to me is that the big shaded block quote comes from 
this book by David Shields.  Specifically that if I turn to page 10 of the 
book that I'll see this example there...and in my mind that would include 
the markup that we've put around it.  This isn't the case, the *text* and 
in some cases linguistic information, may be from the work cited, but it is 
not a quotation from the text.  (i.e. it is academically honest of us to 
cite it, well done, but academically dishonest of us to be presenting it in 
a way which might be confused for a citation for a quotation. 
Interestingly, the TEI Markup is more accurate in using @corresp)

When the TEI Guidelines started there weren't (many) TEI encoded texts. 
Now we have a lot more, and our examples may indeed draw on real existing 
marked up texts as examples of markup.  One could argue that some of the 
Chaucer examples are existing texts, but I don't think they exist in exact 
the format used in the Guidelines.  But, in general, I'd be in favour of 
using real existing TEI examples where the community wished to make them 
available.  This distinction (that we provide the markup) was obvious 
previously, but increasingly is less so.

The problem comes when we cite two examples in the same way, one which is 
an existing TEI text and one which is a text where we've provided the 
markup. If in both cases we just provide a citation underneath then it just 
seems wrong to me.

Since the works cited list has a numbering system why not just use that? 
(Ignoring Sebastian's plaintiff cries of having to pre-sort this or 
similar.)  Thus we'd either just provide a number in square brackets, or 
some leading text such as:

[12]
Source: [12]
Text from: [12]

or similar. Which in the electronic version would be a link to that item in 
the Works Cited, and in the printed version would mean you could go find it 
if you really needed to.  In the majority of examples the source of the 
text is of little or no relevance to the information about TEI markup being 
explained.

Maybe it is just me.

-James


-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk