[tei-council] repeating and typing tei:provenance

[Gabriel BODARD]

Some Council members will already have seen the ticket posted by Lou a 
couple days ago (http://purl.com/TEI/FR/3411976) re the conflict between 
the definition of tei:provenance, "descriptive or other information 
concerning *a single identifiable episode* during the history of a 
manuscript" on the one hand, and on the other examples (including that 
at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html#mshy) in 
which mutiple episodes are described in a single provenance.

I pointed out, in support of the examples over the definition, that 
provenance includes among its possible children tei:listEvent, and that 
some projects have already used this to represent different episodes in 
a manuscript's history within a single tei:provenance.

The consensus on this ticket however seems to be that the definition is 
correct, the examples should be emended, and multiple episodes should be 
represented by repeated, dated tei:provenance elements in tei:history. 
It has also been suggested that provenance is a specialization of 
tei"event, so the usage is fine.

If that is the case, then I'd like to propose (does this need another 
ticket?) that as well as changes to the guidelines and correction of 
examples, the provenance element should allow att.typed (as event does), 
so that multiple provenances in the history of a single manuscript or 
object can be typed ("found", "moved", "observed", "lost", "destroyed", 
"restored" etc.), and looser subtypes can be used to differentiate 
between different kinds of loss, for example. (We were in the process of 
writing up a controlled set of values for tei:event/@type for the EpiDoc 
guidelines, with the intention of leaving @subtype unconstrained.)

Does anyone object to this proposal? Should I put up a new FR ticket for 
it? I'd like to be able to let the EpiDoc community know what we've 
decided so it can be written into our ODD in advance of the next TEI 
release, if possible.

Thanks,

Gabby

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Research Associate in Digital Epigraphy)

Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Email: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/