On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Murray McGillivray wrote:
I wonder if anyone who has worked with using TEI P3-4 to encode manuscript or printed book transcriptions or editions could tell me if a local standard among medievalists is developing for the use of "milestone" elements that have to do with the arrangement of the physical object, such as line break, column break and page break tags.
Specifically, I'm wondering if the attributes given to these tags (such as 'n') usually refer to the page (line, etc.) following or the page (line, etc.) preceding the milestone element. My *guess* is that these breaks are usually connected to the text following, but I don't see a logic in the tags themselves that would require that and my experience of what people do is pretty limited to my own narrow part of the field.
I have always understood the page break or milestone tags to refer to the switch between pages (or whatever). So if going from folio 21 recto to folio 21v I would use <milestone unit="folio" n="21v" /> because the notes to the element states "For this element, the global n attribute indicates the new number or other value for the unit which changes at this milestone." (http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/ref-MILEST.html) And <pb />'s notes state "On this element, the global n attribute indicates the number or other value associated with the page which follows the point of insertion of this <pb>." (http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/ref-PAGEBR.html)
I always also use <milestone /> instead of <pb /> to refer to folio count and <pb /> to refer to record inscribed page numbers that may not be consistent, numerical or in any way sequential. (I transcribed entries from some churchwardens' accounts where the folios had two numbering systems, one being the original chronological order marked in a contemporary hand, the other resulting from when in the 19thC the volume, falling apart was rebound in the order they picked it up off the floor and was the hand of a later archivist.) I'm not suggesting that this is a consensus of how medievalists _should_ do it, just how I have in the past. I'm interested in other opinions.
handshift, etc.) do make reasonably clear, either in their Guidelines description or in the examples given, that they are meant to be used at the beginning of a section of text to which they refer .
I suggest passing it on the TEI mailing list or the sourceforge site, since now is certainly the time to correct confusions in the guidelines.
-James --- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk