Dear Luciana, it's right to think broader than just on medieval charters. But for the momemt I would limit the work to premodern times - although notarial documents and official documents in the Commonwealth certainly didn't break with the traditions as much as it is the case on the European continent. We started our work from historical research with charters as sources. This kind of research deals with many more characteristics of the documents than just the means of authentication. Thus a DTD for these documents has to contain elements on a lot of "metadata" of each document that should be encoded as <chDesc>. <auth>entication is only a part of it, i.e. that part that describes the historical mean of authentication. Thus our description goes beyond diplomatics in the pure legal sense. The really changelling thing will be: What kind of information will be used by historian to do diplomatic criticisism on born digital documents from today? Certainly they will discuss characteristics beyond the current means of authentication, e.g. for printed copies of the digital signed documents bearing no trace of the digital signature any more etc. etc. :-) So I would like to limit our work for the moment on markup for the digital representations of historical documents written on paper / parchment / papyrus / stone etc. in any culture. I was amused when once I had a look on a edition of georgian documents: I couldn't read a word - but they looked so similar to MGH editions ... More difficult to answer is the question if we can distinguish between laws and charters - legal documents both they are. I haven't enougth experience with medieval and early modern laws - but at our meeting three years ago we agreed that we take a charter as a document that receives it's legal validity by it's physical apperance, even if this 'autenticum' doesn't exist any more. We all know the importance of "vidimus et inspeximus privilegia ipsa originalia esse in prima sui figura non cancellata nec abolita non abrasa ..." in a notarial vidimus. But I see your point and I tend to think that the work on historical documents won't be hindered by widening the vocabulary with further descriptions of means of authentication, elements as <digCert> or <MD5> for example could a part of <auth>/<authDesc>. Could the CEI.dtd be in this way also a part of archival diplomatics? Enriching the english diplomatic terminology would be a fine thing and I hope the scholarly community will understand and accept our proposals. All the best Georg PS: If anybody wants to know a bit what we talked about at our first meeting in 2004, maybe these (online) papers written by me might help: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqi031?ijkey=2g2Wfp4rzPQT... (english) http://dobc.unipv.it/scrineum/rivista/2-2004/vogeler.html (italiano) http://www.ahf-muenchen.de/Tagungsberichte/Berichte/pdf/2004/023-04.pdf (deutsch) Je suis désolé que n'éxiste pas encore une texte francaise.
At 10:58 AM 16/02/2007, Georg Vogeler wrote:
A) change of element names (to get a consistend language - although I'm sure that English isn't the best choice for diplomatic terms ...
Dear Georg and all:
My suggestion was much broader than that. I wonder why you wish to limit this initiative to Medieval charters rather than including all charters. If you go to the trouble of not only developing a distinct DTD, but also getting support for it (which is the toughest part), wouldn't it be worthwhile to do something that can be used by every country for the charters of any time? I do not see much (actually any) difference in documentary elements and attributes between the charter issued by my present queen to Petro Canada (a crown corporation) and that issued by Queen Anne to the City of Vancouver, and between the latter and the Medieval ones brought to Canada with them by the first British colonists and preserved in the UBC archives, except of course the language. But the Canada Charter of Rights, for example, has all the diplomatic characteristics of Medieval Charters and I do not see why it should not benefit from this initiative and be accessible online to all Canadian citizens and those who wish to become such.
Furthermore, as most Canadian organizations are Crown corporations, and charters are issued in London, increasingly they are going to be issued only in digital form, from which one can then make authentic copies. Thus we have digitally born documents the authenticity of which relies on their encoding, on their metadata, and on the process of creation, transmission and maintenance. Why should you miss the opportunity of producing a meta-language for a type of document that has an unbroken tradition in so many countries, and whose verifiable trustworthiness is still key to the functioning of present society? A product like this could easily become an ISO standard and dictate the way in which future charters will be created. For such a purpose, the language has to be English (Chinese would also help...but later on). As it stands, English may not be the best choice for diplomatic terms...indeed. Well, let's change that...let's create English neologisms that are appropriate. After all, 60% of English comes from Latin...(they just use the other 40%). Disciplines are supposed to be elaborated and grow...Adding to existing knowledge newly developed concepts and languages is one aspect of scholarly work. We keep accepting passively the documentary language imposed to us by the computer industry and we integrate it in our language seamlessly, just because we have no choice. Let's not wait for them to tell us what contemporary charters are and how they should be encoded and authenticated.
I do realize that this is an heretic idea to many, but I do believe that the primary reason why we are studying the past is to learn things that can help us with present and forthcoming issues, and I have witnessed first hand how vital classic diplomatic knowledge can be to the design of trusted record-making and record-keeping system, of documentary forms, and of workflows...Without it, it is very unlikely that future generations will have any record left to analyze, and if they will, they will not be able to be proven authentic. This is why in our graduate programs diplomatics is a prerequisite to any study of records management and of digital preservation. These graduates will never work with any record created before AD 2000 and they are totally dependent on diplomatic knowledge for that.
I hope this explains where I come from with my comments. Sorry for not having been more explicit earlier.
Thanks for your patience,
Luciana
Dr. Luciana Duranti Chair and Professor, Archival Studies Director, InterPARES Project (www.interpares.org) School of Library, Archival and Information Studies The University of British Columbia Suite 301 - 6190 Agronomy Road Vancouver, B.C.V6T 1Z3 Canada Tel. 604/822-2587 FAX 604/822-6006 http://www.slais.ubc.ca/PEOPLE/faculty/faculty-bio/duranti-bio.htm http://www.interpares.org/ld/
-- ------------------------------------- Dr.Georg Vogeler Historisches Seminar - Abt. Geschichtliche Hilfswissenschaften Ludwig-Maximilians-Universtitaet Muenchen e-mail: g.vogeler@lrz.uni-muenchen.de Internet: http://www.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/ghw/personen_vogeler.shtml