[tei-council] some brief reports to save time during our upcoming conf call

[Kevin Hawkins]

Gang,

This is the second of two promised emails.  This one gives summaries of 
a couple of activities I've been involved in -- all on the agenda under 
"brief reports".  I'm sending these in advance so that we can use the 
time during our call for discussion of these.

= Bibliographic Citations =

Martin Holmes, Laurent Romary, and I (a.k.a. "the biblio gang") have 
been trying to clarify the Guidelines in matters relating to 
bibliographic citations.  Some clarifying copyedits were made after the 
Dublin meeting, and tickets were created on the substantial changes. 
Those tickets have all been discussed and resolved by Council except 
one: bug 2714682, in which we are wrestling with four related issues:

a) whether biblScope should have different semantics depending on its 
parent element

b) whether the Guidelines should be more explicit on whether to use 
biblScope as a child of <imprint> and what it means if it is a child of 
<imprint>

c) whether to add <biblScope> as an allowed child of <analytic>

d) whether we should distinguish between two types of page ranges: those 
pages cited, and the whole range of the item

The three of us are currently discussing these questions by email and 
are converging on a proposed solution, which we will post to the ticket 
and bring back to the Council for consideration.

= TEI Tite =

In September 2010, Laurent appointed me, Greg Suprock (of Apex 
CoVantage), and Perry Trolard (author of Tite) to a workgroup to realign 
the version of Tite used by Apex CoVantage with the canonical version 
maintained in SourceForge and to oversee ongoing evolution of Tite.

Since Apex only maintains a DTD, changes that they made had to be 
recreated in the master ODD in SourceForge.  I believe I've reconciled 
everything, but I have not yet made the time to generate a DTD from the 
latest ODD and check for discrepancies with Apex's version.  This will 
be complicated by the fact that any changes to P5 since Apex first 
created their DTD may filter through when I create a DTD using Roma.

Next up will be taking up various bugs and feature requests related to 
Tite in SourceForge.  These changes would need to be made not only in 
the Tite ODD but also communicated to Apex so that they begin using them 
in their encoding.

= Google Books =

In September 2011, Laurent charged James Cummings, Martin Holmes, me, 
and himself with providing guidance to an engineer from Google who is 
working on adding TEI as an export format for Google Books.

We've been in occasional contact with the engineer, who produced some 
sample documents and asked for feedback.  In addition to our feedback, 
he used a schema for Level 3 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries 
in order to check his output (though mixing in Level-4 elements when has 
the data to do so) and was in contact with the Google Books Library 
Partners about how useful the TEI output would be.  He reported earlier 
this month that "The code has been reviewed and checked in but we're 
still working on some questions related to integrating the code in our 
production pipeline."  He said he might come back for help as they get 
closer to deploying and encouraged us to check back in.

The importance of this for the TEI's PR can't really be understated. 
We, or the Board, might want to give some thought about whether to do 
anything more once Google deloys this code than simply announce it on 
TEI-L with shouts of hurrah/hooray/huzzah.

= Physical Bibliography =

While in Paris, we dealt with a feature request to handle encoding of a 
printer, distributor, etc.  This led someone to suggest we revive the 
Physical Bibliography Work Group, which never completed its work.  Some 
of its recommendations were included in the manuscript description 
module, but other parts were never fully resolved.  We decided that I 
would ask Paul Schaffner and Markus Flatscher if they would be willing 
to revive this group.  I never heard back from either of them.

However, at the 2011 HASTAC conference, one panel included some papers 
from grad students on physical bibliography, which included discussion 
of the inadequacies of TEI markup in that area.  In short: if you want 
to physical/descriptive bibliography of printed books, the elements you 
need are children of msDesc, but the description of this element and its 
children refer to handwritten manuscripts only.

I spoke to the presenters afterwards and asked take over the group with 
guidance from me.  They were quite enthusiastic but have since decided 
that they don't have the time to lead the effort but would still like to 
participate.  They shared their papers with me.

Coincidentally, Sebastiaan Verweij posted to TEI-L in late January with 
very similar concerns to those of the HASTAC presenters.  I've never met 
Sebastiaan at all, but if Council thinks it's appropriate, I'd like to 
approach him to ask him to lead the revival of the Physical Bibliography 
Work Group (with input from the HASTAC presenters and guidance from me 
and anyone else interested in participating).

--Kevin