[tei-council] correspdesc musings

[Lou Burnard]

On 21/08/14 16:45, Martin Holmes wrote:
> On 14-08-21 08:37 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> I thought we'd agreed that the Council would continue to discuss this
>> proposal on the Council list?
> The problem is that we're trying to interact with members of the SIG who
> are not on the Council list. I don't see how we can conduct this on the
> Council list if we want their input.

The council list is just as accessible to them as the SIG list is to 
(non-sig-subscribed) Council members, surely?

>
> Something interesting is emerging, I think, from the recent discussion:
> the SIG group seem (to me) to perceive the proposed corresp stuff as a
> little island of specialized elements and attributes which is not really
> intended to be part of the larger TEI infrastructure.

That's not my reading of the discussion at all. They want specialised 
elements which *can* fit into the TEI framework, just like everyone else.
>   That would
> certainly mean that it could be clean, tight and simple -- dedicated
> elements for a few specific purposes such as <sender> and <addressee>.
> My instinct is to look for ways to generalize these requirements so that
> any new elements or attributes we create might be useful in other
> contexts, but that necessarily involves undermining that simple clarity
> (I would replace <sender> and <recipient> with a generic <participant
> role="something">, which could be useful elsewhere, but Peter (for
> instance) is opposed to this.

We have an element <particDesc> of course which tends to make me prefer 
the notion of a generic participant element like you. However, I think 
you are somewhat misrepresenting Peter's argument too : his notion of 
"sender" and "recipient" seems to be tied closely to the notion of 
"transmission", so it's not the participant, but what the participant 
does which he wants to encode.

6. The place a letter is actually sent from (as witnessed by the
postmark, or other evidence) may be different from the place the
sender/s say it is sent from. (We've all written postcards to send
home, and forgotten to post them!). How would you handle that.