Perhaps the way to handle this is a combination of what Lou, Dot, and Roberto suggest: with the fired up enthusiasm of this community, should we see if we can't put together a posse to give the TEI SIG a push?
As Gabriel Bodard and others at Digital Classicist have pointed out, communities of practice like TEI, DM, DC are all complementary--and indeed share many members. At times they are like different chatrooms in the same larger community.
As people who work more or less exclusively with manuscripts, or better said, whose primary textual sources at any rate are never mechanically reproduced we have an obvious interest in this issue. Though as Roberto points out, the community that needs an effective section in the TEI is much larger... and includes people dealing with correspondence, modern literary manuscripts, documentary editions, and the like. Medievalists with an interest in transcription are perhaps better situated within their own fields than others since the sources are contemporary to the period and seen by most as being a relatively central concern in a way that they might not be in other periods.
Perhaps we should see here who might be interested in putting together a real crew for this and moving things along. At DM we could offer a variety of means of support, particularly a place to publish refereed working and/or finished research papers (We've been working very hard lately at getting our workflow straightened out, and I think we've overcome some of the gremlins that have delayed our production). And of course a place where projects can describe what they are up to--and allow others to find them--in our wiki.
-d
On Wed, 2006-15-03 at 14:47 +0000, Lou Burnard wrote:
Dot, I agree with Roberto!
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.
The only reason it wouldn't work right now is because the <rubric> element is not a member of the class of elements which can appear within transribed text. But absolutely no reason why it couldn't be added to an existing class or a new one (model.titleLike maybe) in a P5 application, or better in a set of proposals for changes to the class system...
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.
I don't understand either of these assertions. The TEI has lots of very specialised tagsets and aims to support very specialist usages within a general framework. And changes to it have to come from within its user community, of which after all DM is a major constituent.
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