Dear DM's
I looking for a bit of an update on current initiatives for encoding medieval MSS with TEI or XML, and being out of the loop of such things recently, I have been having trouble figuring out what is, actually, still current and active.
I've know of a few from past and recent work (TEI workgroup Medieval Manuscript Description, the MARC initiative, the MASTER program, and of course, EPT), but what ones (those and others) should be considered as still active and working -- leading the charge, if you will, towards the markup of medieval MSS?
Much thanks in advance,
Martin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Semper aut discere aut docere aut scribere dulce habui" -- Bede, HE, 5.24 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin K. Foys Associate Professor Department of English Hood College Frederick, MD 21701
vox: 301~696~3740 fax: 301~696~3586 ether: foys@hood.edu
Take a look at the work of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and its parent organization, SEENET. Both were founded by Hoyt Duggan at UVa. Their websites: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/ and http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/ The first contains a listing of SEENET's TEI compliant DTD developed over the last 14 years. It's provision for marginalia elements is an important step. The PPEA site lists the group's Transcriptional Protocols hammered out over the same period first for SGML and now adopted for XML markup. SEENET and the PPEA remain active, publishing documentary editions in CD-ROM format.
regards, Gene Lyman
On 3/12/06, Martin K. Foys foys@hermes.hood.edu wrote:
Martin K. Foys wrote:
Hi Martin,
I would of course recommend using TEI P5 and its Manuscript Description module.[1] This is really the outcome of the most recent work, based on the work of the groups you note and provides some very good ways to record all the metadata one might about a manuscript.[2] That module, combined with the other innovations in others (like <choice> and <g>) which are a boon to the transcription of primary sources, means that if one was starting an edition of a manuscript, then this is what I'd choose. (In fact, what I have chosen for one I'm currently working on.)
-James
[1] See the text of the guidelines for this module at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/MS.html [2] There is an article on TEI's Manuscript Description module in the upcoming issue of the Digital Medievalist journal.
Dear colleagues,
although nothing entirely new, I want to mention that I have been working on the adaptation, customisation and application of TEI-P5 on the German cataloguing practice. This results in a (XML) schema slighly different than the TEI proposal. The use of TEI-P5 manuscript module ("German version") has been documented in a FAQ style. (This is available only in German.) Additionally, based on the results of work done in the project I'm representing, the exchange of data will be possible between the TEI-P5 format and the format of the database Manuscripta Mediaevalia, where the results of German cataloguing activities are assembled.
I will present the project and its results both in Kalamazoo and Leeds.
For materials consult the projects homepage http://www.hab.de/forschung/projekte/master-e.htm.
Best, Torsten
James Cummings ha scritto:
Hi all, while I fully agree with James about the excellent Manuscript Description module (and other goodies in TEI P5), I can't but point out that there currently is a deep imbalance between manuscript *description* and manuscript *transcription* features in TEI P4/P5. The MS transcription SIG was going to deal with lots of interesting stuff (time based encoding, substitution/variation issues, revision of the transcription chapter, etc.) but discussion seems to have stopped (at least on the mailing list, I also wonder if there was a SIG meeting in 2005 like in 2003-04).
I would be very keen to see a restart of the SIG activities. As quite a few people mentioned their specific solutions to MS transcription problems, I also think it could be interesting to collect and compare this information to see what could be used/adapted/useful for inspiration for TEI P5.
Ciao
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
I, of course, must in turn agree with Roberto there is certainly room for improvement in the areas he mentions. Perhaps the right place to collect and compare this information would be on a page off the TEI wiki's MSS SIG page at http://www.tei-c.org.uk/wiki/index.php/SIG:MSS
-James
I'm glad to see Digital Scriptorium cited amongst the transcription and description resources at http://www.tei-c.org.uk/wiki/index.php/SIG:MSS. I hope its pages can still serve as a useful springboard for other work. To my knowledge, the UC Berkeley side of DS should *not* be considered active at present, though I would love to see it enlivened again. There seems to be a shortage of staff and momentum.
I, too, would be interested to see the TEI-MS SIG in motion. Surely there's others on this listserv who wear more than one hat; at MTP we currently encode edited texts from WordPerfect files with reference to MS surrogates or typescripts, not directly from MS (surrogate), but I suspect our methods will be changing a bit as we prepare for a site launch this fall and continue adding content subsequently.
(Btw, for anyone who's wondered when the _Census of Petrarch MSS in the U.S._ will be posted to Digital Scriptorium--advertised for over a year now--its markup is on hold for a few more months till someone can finish her dissertation. ahem. But it's 90+% complete.)
Cheers, Sharon
-- Sharon K. Goetz, Associate Editor Mark Twain Papers & Project http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/
I add few links : - one link for manuscript description : the summary of reviews of the manuscript description chapter : http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/MS/msw05.xml - links for manuscript transcription : a new electronic edition in TEI P4 by Ecole des chartes : les chroniques latines de Saint-Denis : http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/chroniqueslatines/ and two guidelines in french (vive le multinlinguisme :-) ) to encode medieval deeds (It's an handwritten source too !). We are beginning a project in Ecole des chartes to make an inventory of translations in vernacular language of classical texts and we use the new manuscript Description module that is very good answer for our needs. I hope we can propose the guidelines of this work for the autumn. I hope this few links and informations will be able to help you
Gautier Poupeau
PS : I'm sorry for my awful english...
Saw this in the Washington Post recently:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301...
~ Martin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Semper aut discere aut docere aut scribere dulce habui" -- Bede, HE, 5.24 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin K. Foys Associate Professor Department of English Hood College Frederick, MD 21701
vox: 301~696~3740 fax: 301~696~3586 ether: foys@hood.edu
On Mon, 2006-13-03 at 10:47 +0100, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
James Cummings ha scritto:
I was wondering if somebody would mention this, or if I was missing something.
Should we look into starting it up again? I.e. as a DM/TEI initiative? Of course the actual base of participants must be larger since manuscript transcription is not an exclusively medieval concern. But we certainly are concerned about it as or more centrally than other disciplines.
Ciao
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
On 3/13/06, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco rosselli@ling.unipi.it wrote:
-- *************************************** Dot Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506
dporter@uky.edu 859-257-9549 ***************************************
Dot Porter ha scritto:
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
Dot, I agree with Roberto!
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 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.
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:
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Daniel O'Donnell -
Dot Porter -
Gautier Poupeau -
Gene Lyman -
James Cummings -
Lou Burnard -
Martin K. Foys -
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco -
Sharon Goetz -
Torsten Schaßan