Dear all,
as a Ph.D. student working on palaeography and computing, I find this mailing list very useful and I start my contribution with a question.
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I know the TEI guidelines and the efforts of some specific projects such as Digital Scriptorium, but none of them seems to me to go into the image with the granularity needed for a palaeographical analysis.
Cheers,
Arianna Ciula
---------------------- Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
There are other members of the list who know more than I do about this. Roberto? -dan
Arianna Ciula wrote:
Dear all,
as a Ph.D. student working on palaeography and computing, I find this mailing list very useful and I start my contribution with a question.
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I know the TEI guidelines and the efforts of some specific projects such as Digital Scriptorium, but none of them seems to me to go into the image with the granularity needed for a palaeographical analysis.
Cheers,
Arianna Ciula
Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
Hi Arianna!
Il lun, 2004-06-28 alle 16:51, Daniel O'Donnell ha scritto:
There are other members of the list who know more than I do about this. Roberto? -dan
Arianna Ciula wrote:
Dear all,
as a Ph.D. student working on palaeography and computing, I find this mailing list very useful and I start my contribution with a question.
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I know the TEI guidelines and the efforts of some specific projects such as Digital Scriptorium, but none of them seems to me to go into the image with the granularity needed for a palaeographical analysis.
I can only add to the previous replies (by James and Dorothy) that there's a TEI SIG (Special Interest Group) devoted to manuscript transcription, this is the web site URL:
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/Manuscript/
and this is where you go to subscribe to the mailing list:
http://listserv.brown.edu/tei-ms-sig.html
The list has been very quiet lately, but please don't hesitate to bring up the issues you want to discuss.
Ciao
Dear Arianna,
there exist as well resources of an European project on manuscript descriptions: MASTER (**Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records). The MASTER-DTD has been developed in close cooperation with TEI and therefore it may be to general for your purposes as well, but better have a look at it:
http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/master/
In the digitization project CEEC (Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis, www.ceec.uni-koeln.de) we adjusted the MASTER-DTD to our needs and therefore have slightly more elements/attributes for the physical description.
Within the project CEEC a colleague of mine, Patrick Sahle, developed a tool for palaeographical analysis. This includes an inchoate DTD, which because of the nature of the tool is meant only to cover measures and other physical characteristics. Unfortunately, the documentation is available only in German.
Greetings, Torsten Schassan ** Arianna Ciula wrote:
Dear all,
as a Ph.D. student working on palaeography and computing, I find this mailing list very useful and I start my contribution with a question.
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I know the TEI guidelines and the efforts of some specific projects such as Digital Scriptorium, but none of them seems to me to go into the image with the granularity needed for a palaeographical analysis.
Cheers,
Arianna Ciula
Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
Arianna Ciula wrote:
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I've been working on/with a DTD for manuscript transcription for some time that takes physical features (quires, pages, text areas etc.) as primary and that has a section (based to some extent on the TEI P3 Writing System Declaration) where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration, and assigned Unicode or other code points. Is that the sort of thing you're asking about? (If you want instead to annotate paleographic events or oddities in the course of running transcription, like a four-minim letter "m", the current TEI note provisions may well be adequate.) This transcription DTD of mine is not really ready for prime time, but if it seems to be the kind of thing you're looking for, I'm happy to share. (This is not the DTD on the Web site I referred to a few days ago, though that simplified one is composed of elements extracted from it.)
Murray McGillivray
I'll try to explain better my needs. I'd like to have a kind of reference for the description of the morphology (meaning palaeographical shapes) of letters, ligatures and so on. I probably could build my own structure and try to express it using XML, but, before doing that, I wanted to look around and see if some more ambitious international project has already faced the problem.
So, when you say "where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration"
what do you mean for "can be described"?
Do you have a set of possible terms to use in the description?
Cheers,
Arianna On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:39:37 -0600 Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca wrote:
Arianna Ciula wrote:
Is there any sort of DTD designed with the purpose of describing a medieval manuscript, not just in its physical features as a global object, but in its palaeographical features?
I mean any kind of XML grill and hierarchy able to encounter description and comments on the shape of letters, of ligatures and so on, even related just to one period and one handwritten style.
I've been working on/with a DTD for manuscript transcription for some time that takes physical features (quires, pages, text areas etc.) as primary and that has a section (based to some extent on the TEI P3 Writing System Declaration) where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration, and assigned Unicode or other code points. Is that the sort of thing you're asking about? (If you want instead to annotate paleographic events or oddities in the course of running transcription, like a four-minim letter "m", the current TEI note provisions may well be adequate.) This transcription DTD of mine is not really ready for prime time, but if it seems to be the kind of thing you're looking for, I'm happy to share. (This is not the DTD on the Web site I referred to a few days ago, though that simplified one is composed of elements extracted from it.)
Murray McGillivray
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
---------------------- Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:57:54 +0100 Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk wrote:
I'll try to explain better my needs. I'd like to have a kind of reference for the description of the morphology (meaning palaeographical shapes) of letters, ligatures and so on. I probably could build my own structure and try to express it using XML, but, before doing that, I wanted to look around and see if some more ambitious international project has already faced the problem.
So, when you say "where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration"
what do you mean for "can be described"?
Do you have a set of possible terms to use in the description?
Cheers,
Arianna
Arianna --
The discussion so far about how to go about such stuff has been entirely TEI/logocentric in its approach to the data. For an alternative approach, you might also want to look into the work of Satoko Tokunaga and Tomohiro Kishida at Keio University, Japan.
They gave a fantastic talk last summer at Peter Robinson's New Technology/Old Text conference on “Computer-assisted analysis of Caxton's Typography," in which they demonstrate software they had developed for morphological analysis of individual characters. Very impressive stuff, and an important addition to the usual mode of trying to describe visual shapes through textual descriptions.
~ Martin Foys
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin K. Foys Assistant Professor Department of English Hood College Frederick, MD 21701
vox: 301~696~3740 fax: 301~696~3586 ether: foys@hood.edu
Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition: http://www.sd-editions.com
Arianna:
"can be described" meant "can be described using words and images," not "can be described using special-purpose tags." The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that.
Murray
Arianna Ciula wrote:
So, when you say "where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration"
what do you mean for "can be described"?
That's exactly what I meant! But you expressed it with the right words.
There are two main problems though.
The firs one is related to the fact that every style can be so particular to need a very specific terminology for its description.
Secondly, the danger is that different projects, departing from TEI guidelines, develop their own extensions, creating another variety of terms that will add to the huge variety already evident in the traditional literature.
Arianna Ciula On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:36:24 -0600 Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca wrote:
Arianna:
"can be described" meant "can be described using words and images," not "can be described using special-purpose tags." The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that.
Murray
Arianna Ciula wrote:
So, when you say "where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration"
what do you mean for "can be described"?
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
---------------------- Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
Arianna,
You may already know that the University of London Library has been working on a Thesaurus for Manuscript Studies. Its aim is to provide researchers with a controlled vocabulary of specialised terms, arranged hierarchically. The web interface for thesaurus is under development (http://193.63.81.247/) but, if you are based in London, you may be able to use thesaurus in the Library.
Elizabeth
That's exactly what I meant! But you expressed it with the right words.
There are two main problems though.
The firs one is related to the fact that every style can be so particular to need a very specific terminology for its description.
Secondly, the danger is that different projects, departing from TEI guidelines, develop their own extensions, creating another variety of terms that will add to the huge variety already evident in the traditional literature.
Arianna Ciula On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:36:24 -0600 Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca wrote:
Arianna:
"can be described" meant "can be described using words and images," not "can be described using special-purpose tags." The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that.
Murray
Arianna Ciula wrote:
So, when you say "where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration"
what do you mean for "can be described"?
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
The Comite international de paleographie latine does have an ongoing project to create a standardized vocabulary of codicology. It's a far cry from graphical metrics, of course, but any attempt to create a framework for the description of hands should certainly take it into account:
http://vocabulaire.irht.cnrs.fr/vocab.htm
The site is "optimized for use with IE," and my Safari can't handle it. So much for standardization. ;-)
Josh Westgard
--On Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:36 AM -0600 Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca wrote:
Arianna:
"can be described" meant "can be described using words and images," not "can be described using special-purpose tags." The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that.
Murray
Il lun, 2004-06-28 alle 23:39, Murray McGillivray ha scritto:
I've been working on/with a DTD for manuscript transcription for some time that takes physical features (quires, pages, text areas etc.) as primary and that has a section (based to some extent on the TEI P3 Writing System Declaration) where each glyph used in the manuscript including ligatures or junctures (sorted by hand and script) can be described, linked to a typical image or more and a transcription and transliteration, and assigned Unicode or other code points. Is that the sort of thing you're asking about? (If you want instead to annotate paleographic events or oddities in the course of running transcription, like a four-minim letter "m", the current TEI note provisions may well be adequate.) This transcription DTD of mine is not really ready for prime time, but if it seems to be the kind of thing you're looking for, I'm happy to share. (This is not the DTD on the Web site I referred to a few days ago, though that simplified one is composed of elements extracted from it.)
I'm also very interested in this. Could it work as a TEI extension? (I hope this is no a too naive question :) Have you thought about proposing it to the TEI editors for P5? I see a lot of work poured into manuscript *description*, but very little wrt ms *transcription*, improving on the current "Transcription of Primary Sources" chapter. Of course feel free to correct me anytime, Lou :)
Ciao
-
Arianna Ciula -
Daniel O'Donnell -
elizabeth.solopova＠bodley.ox.ac.uk -
Joshua Westgard -
Martin K. Foys -
Murray McGillivray -
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco -
Torsten Schaßan