[tei-council] Fwd: Tite: header

[Lou Burnard]

Here's a note I sent to Perry, Laurent, and Dan back in March about what 
I consider to be a really off the wall modification introduced into TEI 
Tite.

I never got any response, which is fine, we're all busy. But I would 
like to know whether anyone else feels as I do, or whether I should just 
keep this particular opinion to myself.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Tite: header
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 15:03:40 +0000
From: Lou <lou.burnard at oucs.ox.ac.uk>
To: Perry Trolard <ptrolard at artsci.wustl.edu>, Laurent Romary 
<laurent.romary at loria.fr>, "daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca" 
<daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca>

Why no TEI Header in TEI Tite documents?

The spec at
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-exemplars/html/tei_tite.doc.html#teistruct

says

"Tite omits the <teiHeader> element as a convenience to transcribers.
This departs from normal TEI practice, which requires <TEI> as the root
element, containing <teiHeader> and text elements. In order to bring a
document encoded in TEI Tite into adherence with the TEI abstract model,
projects should add a teiHeader before engaging in post-transcription
processing. "

Why is it a "convenience to transcribers" to prevent them from adding
useful metadata to the text they have described?

In its absence, how will they indicate

a) which text this xml document is supposed to represent or be a part of?
b) when they did it?
c) what's the status (preliminary, finished, proofed etc.) of this xml
document?
d) who's responsible for shipping it, paying for it, handling questions
about it?
etc?

Presumably they will still do those things somehow -- by file naming
conventions, associated paper work, mutual convention, or other means...

Why not use the tool at hand for the job?

No-one is saying that a "tite" TEI Header (or any other) need contain a
kosher bibliographic description -- for that job we apply the
rabbinical skills of the cataloguers when the xml document is
accessioned. But it can still contain all that is needed for conformance
to the TEI abstract model, namely

* a title
* a source description
* a responsibility statement

The title might be "text number 9456", the source description might be
"microfilm batch number 6181032" and the responsibility statement might
be "Joes Garage" but that would still be better than nothing at all, surely?

I think the decision to junk the header in this context shows a
surprising lack of imagination about what it's meant for, and how it can
be used.

I suggest we should try a bit harder to propose some minimal header
structure that would fit in with the work flow anticipated for Tite
documents. My belief is that Apex would welcome such an idea, though I
haven't yet asked them!

Lou