[tei-council] Certainty within milestoneLike
Gabriel BODARD
gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
Tue Jul 31 10:45:50 EDT 2012
At Ann Arbor I was asked to do a survey of the TEI Guidelines to see
what sort of changes would be involved in adding the certLike elements
(certainty, precision and respons) to the content model of milestoneLike
elements, as discussed in ticket <http://purl.org/tei/fr/3416130> (tl;dr
version: this would allow the use of @match='..' to point to these
elements and make various kinds of certainty/precision statements about
various aspects/attributes of these elements). I have surveyed the 44
currently empty elements in the TEI, and have the following recommendations:
MILESTONE (cb, gb, lb, milestone, pb): these are the element that my
feature request as written proposes to add certLike to.
TRANSCRIPTIONAL (caesura, handShift, pause, redo, shift, undo, move):
these elements involve aspects of the transcription of the text and so
are potentially subject to interpretation, uncertainty or other
qualification. For consistency's sake, you might argue that these should
be treated like the milestone elements too.
TRANSCRIPTIONAL, SPANNING (addSpan, anchor, damageSpan, delSpan,
lacunaEnd, lacunaStart, witEnd, witStart): these are also
transcriptional elements, but since they all mark the beginning and end
of ranges or spans, there may be less features of such elements that are
subject to interpretation, so the argument for allowing certLike inside
them may be weaker. I am agnostic.
LINKING (alt, link): in principle these are not transcriptional but
stand-off elements, so probably don't need certLike in any event. (Cf.
however <join>, which is already only pseudo-empty.)
ODD (attRef, catRef, classRef, elementRef, equiv, macroRef, specDesc,
specGrpRef): obviously not. These should remain empty.
FS (binary, default, fsdLink, iff, numeric, symbol, then, when):
presumably not either, although I don't pretend to have any idea what FS
is about.
ADMIN (graphic, ptr, variantEncoding, refState): for want of a better
label--these elements are not really transcription but rather support
the markup, so I suspect they don't need certLike at all.
DICTIONARIES (oRef, pRef): my instinct is to say these don't either, but
is this module ever used to transcribe existing print dictionaries, and
so subject to the sorts of uncertainty that other transcription elements
are? If so, then yes, they deserve in as much as TRANSCRIPTIONAL (above) do.
*My Proposal:* to accept the ticket and add certLike to the content
model of the milestoneLike and transcriptional elements listed above. If
anyone feels strongly that the transcriptional/spanning elements and/or
the dictionary elements should also be added to this group, then please
shout now.
Objections and counter-proposals welcome, of course.
Cheers,
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/
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