Dot Porter ha scritto:
As part of my presentation at Kalamazoo last year I described how (for Electronic Boethius) I modified some of the manuscript description elements for use in transcription (for example, marking rubrics in the text using the <rubric> element). This obviously wouldn't work if one wanted to both describe and transcribe a text in the same document (as most probably would?) but for EBo I think it worked okay.
I personally would like to see an effort to bring manuscript description and transcription together more closely. I think that this would be done best not from within the TEI (and I speak as a member on the TEI council), because the interests of the TEI are quite general. But if the DM were to support an effort - a "Manuscript Encoding Initiative" - incorporating manuscript description and transcription (including codicology)...
Dot, you raise an interesting issue here (using description elements in transcription; BTW what would be the problem with using them "to both describe and transcribe a text in the same document"???).
As for reviving discussion on ms transcription, however, I doubt a DM-supported initiative would be feasible: if you think about it, the SIGs are a way to have non-TEI people work on TEI-related issues, so it's already "not from within the TEI". The problem lies in the fact that the "manuscript transcription community", and that includes me of course, didn't manage to keep the SIG alive during the last year. Simply renaming a working group from TEI SIG to DM Manuscript Transcription Initiative wouldn't help much IMHO: it's the same people after all.
What should we do then? My 0.02€:
* the last SIG meeting (Baltimore, 23 October 2004) hinted at work to be done on time based encoding and Chapter 18 (Transcription of Primary Sources) revision: if something has been done by anyone, please put it on the wiki and let's start discussion on the SIG mailing list; * apart from time based computing, many specific problems, even basic ones (graphical words vs semantical words, marginalia, etc.) should be discussed to arrive to a proposal before P5 is finalized: a good start, as I wrote in a previous message, would be looking at what solutions people adopted for their own projects (again on the SIG ml + wiki); * this very discussion should be moved to the SIG ml :)
Ciao