[tei-council] correspdesc musings

[Martin Holmes]

HI Peter,

Just on this point:

> <participant role="something“> would be an intermediate to <name
> role="something“>

I don't really see it that way; a participant may not be a name or even
a known person (anonymous correspondence is quite common), and it might
be several people or an organization. I see a participant as an agent.

In our Despatches project <http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca>, a single piece of 
correspondence has not only a sender and a recipient but, after receipt 
at the Colonial Office, it becomes the venue for a written discussion 
among Colonial Office staff, in the form of notes described as 
"minutes". These people usually sign with initials, and are often 
identifiable but sometimes not. After that, a draft reply may be started 
on the same document, written by a staff member, which then serves as 
the basis for another piece of correspondence. I would like to capture 
all of these participants and their roles in an appropriate manner. A 
limited range of specialist elements such as <sender> and <recipient> 
seems impoverished to me.

Cheers,
Martin

On 14-08-22 05:51 AM, Peter Stadler wrote:
>
> Am 21.08.2014 um 17:52 schrieb Lou Burnard
> <lou.burnard at RETIRED.OX.AC.UK>:
>
>> 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?
> Yes, true. Nevertheless there are currently 105(!) subscribers to the
> TEI-CORRESP-SIG list and I hope someone will find the reply button.
> Having emails pushed to those 105 people increases this possibility
> rather wanting them to pull from the Council list.
>
>>> 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.
> Hmm, how is a TEI module (that’s what we are proposing) not 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.
> Yes, we propose specialised elements for the encoding of one act of
> correspondence (mediated communication)
>
>>> 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.
> I really don’t care about the tag names. But yes, my idea is to have
> a very (semantically clear and) constrained set of header elements
> for the description of correspondence. <participant role="something“>
> would be an intermediate to <name role="something“>, am I right? And
> I wonder if there was a concrete use case for that intermediate? I
> hope I do not sound to harsh — I do not try to oppose something but
> try to explain our proposal (the guiding concepts). So, if some
> concepts can be abstracted from our proposal, that’s great but I
> can’t see that at the moment.
>
>> 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.
> Yes, thank you.
>
>> 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.
> Well, I’d say it depends on your editorial principles ;-) If you were
> interested in the factual place, you’d encode that. If you were
> interested in the narrative place, you’d encode that. If you were
> interested in both, you’d encode two placeSender with different
> @type
>
>
> I wonder whether it would be nice (well, it would be nice!) if some
> Council members would be interested in a conf call with the
> correspDesc task force? We already had a chat with Syd but it might
> be good to have some sort of a breakout group to discuss these things
> orally? What do you think? Any volunteers? End of next week could be
> a feasible date?!
>
> Best Peter
>
>
>
>