[tei-council] note in sourceDesc

[James Cummings]

On 11/03/14 18:47, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> The reasoning there is fairly iffy.  You’d be the first one normally
> to hold up your hand and say we shouldn’t make individual changes like this
> to suit one project, but should look at the bigger picture. Which in this case
> is the age-old issue of <p> in the header.

I certainly agree with this.

> I think you’re conflating two distinct things:
>
>    a) possibly <note> is a good addition to all the <p>-like contexts in the header.
> not that convinced myself, but it’s a case to make

I don't actually object to that... I'm generally in favour of 
<note> in more contexts. Though as with the use of <p> in the 
body of a text vs <p> in the header, I worry that we're somehow 
stretching the semantics of <note> if using it like this since it 
turns it into a general purpose container rather than a 'note or 
annotation'. I may be splitting hairs there though. I wouldn't 
scream and shout if note was available more places in the header.

>    b) your problem today that you want to constrain <p> very severely but don’t
> want that to affect the header.  the solution you propose (allowing
> note in sourceDesc) is uncharacteristically limited and non-scaleable, imho.

It might be desirable to be able to limit the content of <p> in 
the header (or text), but the you get into the question of 
whether we really should be having two different elements.  I 
still support the replacement of a highly limited <para> (or 
whatever) in the header.

> then there is the possible red herring of
>    c) the issue of how one says “there is no source” in the mandatory <sourceDesc>.
> I refer the court to the Rahtz/Driscoll anti-matter proposal of last autumn…..

If the sometimes overly problematised witterings of the new 
historicists taught us anything it is that there is *always* a 
source.  I would argue that your TEI might be 'born digital' or 
'created from the fantasies of my puerile brain', but then _you_ 
are the source and everything you have experienced in your life 
up to that point is an influence on you as that source. If you 
truly think you create documents ab initio with no sources or 
influences then I recommend some omphaloskepsis to consider the 
matter. I'm not suggesting you document all those influences in 
your <sourceDesc>, merely that if created from scratch then that 
this act of creation deserves to be documented. Potentially even 
*more so* if it has no 'source'. <sourceDesc><p>Created by 
Sebastian Rahtz on 2014-03-12</p></sourceDesc>.  I'm not saying 
that author/date aren't recorded elsewhere but documenting the 
source of this TEI document is important metadata and we 
shouldn't ever encourage people not to provide it. This is one of 
the reasons that having <listPerson> in <sourceDesc> is a good thing.

If we had made, for example, <sourceDesc/> legal to indicate 
"there is no source but the person listed as <author> in the 
titleStmt" then this would encourage people to do this even when 
there was a source.  ("Oh, I'll go fill that in later...") This 
would be, IMHO, a bad thing. We can't make people do good things, 
but we can try to prevent them doing bad things.

My two pence,

-James


-- 
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford