[tei-council] report on <correspDesc> proposal

[Peter Stadler]

Dear Council fellows, dear Martin,

one of my actions from the last conf call was to report on the proposal we are currently preparing with the Correspondence SIG task force „correspDesc“. I will do so in some brevity just to outline our roadmap and to point you at the resources we already have. I copied Martin in since one of my questions is whether to turn this into a workshop for the TEI MM at Northwestern (jump to „Workshop“ if you want to skip the report).

Ok, you might know that the <correspDesc> element has been on the SIG’s agenda since its first meeting in 2008. The general idea is to have a dedicated section in the teiHeader for correspondence specific meta data such as sender, addressee, etc. This stems back from the DALF guidelines [1] and was picked up by our own project WeGA [2]. There are more issues to encoding correspondence (postscript, signed/salute etc.) but with our current task force we decided to focus on the meta data first since it seemed less uncontroversial and wouldn’t break current schemas.
Apart from creating extra TEI elements and allowing the full fledged standard to be applied to letters and the like we are also looking into extracting a minimal subset for what we call „correspondence interchange format“. The basic idea is to have a simple catalogue (a list) of correspondence items for each repository which can be harvested by a central web service, thus interconnecting letter collections by persons, dates and places.
What we’ve done so far is documented at [3], and ODD files and examples can be grabbed at [4].

Roadmap
The schema is more or less settled (well, there are still some issues) and right now we are trying to put together and polish the prose descriptions. 
We will then create a formal feature request for discussion at the Oxford f2f.

Workshop
I think the Genetic Encoding group did a good job in organizing a workshop after the approval for disseminating its work. Surely, I don’t want to anticipate Council’s decision on this proposal but if it *was* accepted I think it would be nice to have a workshop for this?! (If we had a workshop, I think we could skip the SIG meeting)
Well, I’m just pushing these ideas out since it’s almost end of March … please excuse any shortcomings.

Looking forward to your feedback and all the best
Peter

[1] http://ctb.kantl.be/project/dalf/dalfdoc/index.html
[2] https://github.com/Edirom/WeGA-ODD
[3] http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:Correspondence/task-force-correspDesc
[4] https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/correspDesc

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