[tei-council] Fwd: [TEI-CORRESP-SIG] correspDesc - recent discussion

[Lou Burnard]

The summary linked to from this message is useful!

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[TEI-CORRESP-SIG] correspDesc - recent discussion
Date: 	Tue, 2 Sep 2014 17:07:07 +0200
From: 	Marcel Illetschko <marcelilletschko at GMX.NET>
Reply-To: 	Marcel Illetschko <marcelilletschko at GMX.NET>
To: 	TEI-CORRESP-SIG at LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU



Dear list-members,

in order to keep our recent discussion on the <correspDesc>-proposal 
going I allowed myself to gather all statements made so far.
I think it's important to distinguish between ideas that have already 
found some sort of acceptance by many letter-aficionados (i.e 
<correspDesc> itself) and parts of the proposal that need revision.

For example <context>: We just wanted to say that an act of written 
communication becomes manifest in a piece of correspondence, that is 
generally part of a communication continuum. As such it often has an 
antecessor/successor, a preciding and following act of communication in 
the same communication continuum, in which it is locatable by its 
position between the messages sent ‚before’ and ‚after’. We didn’t think 
of any archival context at all for that could never be part of the 
communication process – it’s all really just about a temporal sequence. 
– But that’s actually more difficult than it may seem: Let’s say we work 
on a critical edition of all the letters of person A – so on Monday, the 
1st of January 1901 he writes ten letters to ten different people. On 
Wednesday he receives five answers to his letters, on Thursday four, and 
the last one two months later. Of course the user of our webplattform 
could sort the letters by person and find all the information he needs 
(person K’s answer to person A’s letter from the 1st of January was 
received in March 1901) – but it could also be handy to have this 
information gathered in one place. Especially when the delivery of 
letters overlaps – and the answer to a letter by person A is not person 
B’s letter of the next day but maybe the one three weeks later because 
one of the letters got stuck. The situation becomes more difficult if 
your edition only covers the letters written by person A – without 
answers. Or if an edition of all the letters written by person A already 
exists and you only want to combine these letters with the ones written 
by person B. If you think about interchangeability it could also be of 
interest to find out who was discussing a specific topic at a specific 
time – in which communicative networks... And so on... the date could be 
helpful – but to find out the correct chronology is part of the editing 
process and should be given in a specific element. That all is due to 
the fact that correspondence is communication – sending and receiving!

You will find the relevant information on the SIG's wiki - combined with 
many comments by the task force members:
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:Correspondence/task-force-correspDesc/summary_of_the_recent_discussion

Reading all of it may take some time - but it will be a good basis for 
further discussions.
Please feel free to add to this list - I will do my best to keep it up 
to date. And please forgive me if I have overlooked some of your ideas - 
that was not my intention.

Best,
Marcel