[tei-council] certainty revised

[Martin Holmes]

Here's my couple of cents on the first part -- I haven't had time to get 
through it all yet:

---------------------

QUOTE:

[one]
the note element defined in section 3.8 Notes, Annotation, and Indexing 
may be used with a value of certainty for its type  attribute.

[two (example)]
<persName>Elizabeth</persName> went to <placeName>Essex</placeName>. She 
had always liked <placeName>Essex</placeName>.
<note type="uncertainty" resp="#MSM">It is not
clear here whether <mentioned>Essex</mentioned>
refers to the place or to the nobleman. -MSM</note>

COMMENT:

The text says type="certainty", the example shows type="uncertainty".

---------------------

QUOTE:

@match  	supplies an arbitrary XPath expression identifying a set of 
nodes, selected within the context identified by the target attribute if 
this is supplied, or by the parent element if it is not.

COMMENT:

This was at the heart of the previous discussion, and for me it's still 
not absolutely clear at this point in the text. The parent element of 
what? Later we learn that it's the parent of the <certainty>, 
<precision> or <respons> element bearing the @match attribute, but I 
think it would help to specify it here.

---------------------

QUOTE:

[one]
The certainty element is designed to encode the following sorts:
[...]
     * the content of an element is uncertain, perhaps because it is 
hard to read or hard to hear, or for some other reason.

[two (just below)]
The following types of uncertainty are not indicated with the certainty 
element:
[...]
     * the document being transcribed may be read in different ways (for 
this use the transcriptional elements such as unclear, discussed in 
chapter 11 Representation of Primary Sources)

COMMENT:

These seem in direct contradiction: the first is saying "use <certainty> 
where the text is uncertain because it's hard to read", and the second 
is saying "don't use <certainty where the text may be read in different 
ways because it's unclear". If this isn't a contradiction, then I think 
it needs more detailed explanation.

---------------------

QUOTE:

locus  	indicates more exactly the aspect concerning which uncertainty 
is being expressed: for example, whether the markup is correctly 
located, whether the right element or attribute name has been used, 
whether the content of the element or attribute is correct, etc.

COMMENT:

Since @locus is constrained to one of five fixed values (according to 
<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-certainty.html>, 
I think it would be best to specify that here. As it reads now, you 
might get the impression that anything goes.


Hope this helps,
Martin

Lou Burnard wrote:
> Some council members may remember that in October last there was a flurry of debate about the correct way to describe usage for the newly introduced @match attribute on <precision> <certainty> and <respons>. The issue is documented, largely, on SF ticket #2877940, and over the last few weeks I've been batting ideas about how to resolve it with a few experts, notably Wendell P. We've now reached the stage of having a draft revision of the chapter which none of the experts has declared themself unhappy with, and I would therefore now like to pass this under the critical nose of the council. 
> 
> Please could you devote half an hour or so of careful reading to
> 
> http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/P5/Guidelines-web/en/html/CE.html
> 
> 
> Like Eccles, the chapter is short, and (in parts) dense. 
> 
> I don't feel I can close the ticket without some kind of imprimatur from the Council, since although there is very little or nothing changed in terms of document validity, there has been quite a lot of revision in the way the features of this module are described, and almost certainly there remain some inconsistencies of expression or typos.
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)
Half-Baked Software, Inc.
(mholmes at halfbakedsoftware.com)
martin at mholmes.com