[tei-council] Bug 506: examples for @corresp

Fri Dec 20 12:58:30 EST 2013

On 13-12-20 09:35 AM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> I think we'd want to add some explanation before or after the example
> explaining that the point of this example is not just to show linking
> from the document to an endnote but that the linking is in two directions.
>
> Still, if I were reading the Guidelines, this example would raise a
> question for me: why not use @target on <persName> as well?  I suspect
> the answer is that @target is not allowed on <persName>, but then this
> makes me wonder why the TEI doesn't add it -- or at least we wouldn't
> acknowledge that someone might want to do so.
>
> To put it more bluntly, the example strikes me as attribute abuse
> designed to avoid having to create a customization, and I don't think
> we'd want to promote such practice.

I think this illustrates the very nature of the problem: we argue 
endlessly about which attributes ought to be on which elements, and add 
them one by one in grudging response to requests, but what people 
actually want is to link virtually anything to virtually anything else, 
with the attribute providing the semantics of the link; half the time, 
they're forced to use global attributes such as @corresp because the one 
they actually want (@resp, @target) is not available on the elements 
they need to link.

This will keep happening -- people will keep on needing to link things 
together in ways that we don't allow them to, and we'll keep on taking a 
year to argue about whether @x belongs on element y, and refusing to 
make attributes global -- and as a result we will continue to force 
people into a much looser usage of e.g. @corresp than we originally 
intended. Because the looser usage in this case is now the norm, we have 
to accept it and exemplify it. Perhaps some will argue that even if the 
entire community is doing something, they can all still be wrong and we 
can hold fast to our strict definition and condemn them; but let's 
remember that the TEI is a "community-based specification", not a de 
jure standard (<http://jtei.revues.org/523>); we're supposed to respond 
to the community's needs, not police their behaviour.

I purposely took this example from Syd and Julia's teaching materials 
because that shows that not only have people been doing this for years, 
it's actually been specifically taught by the two most well-respected 
and widely-travelled instructors in the TEI world, going right back to 
P4. Surely we can put something like that into the Guidelines.

Actually, though, ranting aside, I disagree about the suggestion that 
@target is appropriate. The persName is surely not a pointer to the 
note; it's a persName which happens to have a note associated with it.

Cheers,
Martin

>
> --Kevin
>
> On 12/20/2013 12:24 PM, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> <https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/bugs/506/>
>>
>> In Oxford I was tasked with clarifying the use of @corresp. The
>> Council's view was that although a strict interpretation of @corresp
>> (that it "should only be used where the target and source are
>> interchangeable") is possible, based especially on its history in
>> previous versions of the Guidelines, the actual definition in P5 is much
>> looser, and general practice in the TEI community has been to use
>> @corresp as a general-purpose linking tool.
>>
>> The task is to come up with a second example for the Spec file which
>> shows a looser usage of @corresp. I'm supposed to run this by Council
>> before adding it to the Guidelines.
>>
>> I'm proposing something based on advice from the Syd and Julia show here:
>>
>> <http://www.wwp.brown.edu/research/publications/guide/html/referencing_notes.html>
>>
>> where @corresp is proposed as a way of linking an element in the text to
>> a footnote or endnote. The example there is in P4, but updated and
>> slightly simplified it would be something like this:
>>
>> <body>
>> <!-- ... -->
>>      <p>It remained to the glorious
>>        <persName id="a001" corresp="#n001"">Cromwell</persName>
>>        to tame this tiger...</p>
>> <!-- ... -->
>> </body>
>>
>> <!-- ... -->
>>
>> <back>
>>      <note id="n001" target="#a001">
>>        <p>
>>          The famed<persName>Oliver
>>          Cromwell</persName>, Lord Protector...
>>        </p>
>>      </note>
>> </back>
>>
>> I think it's unambiguous here that the<persName>  is not interchangeable
>> with the<note>, so this should satisfy the need for a looser example.
>> Does anyone have any objections to this? Syd, is there a source for it,
>> or was it made up?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)