At 02:07 AM 18/02/2007, you wrote:
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. :-)
Yes, but they will start out by determining whether they can trust an entity that has been re-produced an infinite number of times and whose original they will never see. After they will have established that the means of authentication were adequate to ensure the trustworthiness of what they are looking at, they will start analysing the document, obviously beginning with the profile (metadata schema), and then moving to the traditional elements.
So I would like to limit our work for the moment on markup for the digital representations of historical documents written on paper / parchment / papyrus / stone etc.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 ...
I fully agree with all the above. I would also stick with charters as documentary forms and with the digitized ones only, for the moment. However we could deal with dgitized analogue charters from medieval times to today rather than up to the 16th or 17th century, and we could use a language and a model capable of expansion rather than so focused on medieval and early modern material that it is impossible to use for contemporary material. We have invocations in todays charters, for example, such as "In the Name of the Republic or of the People", but if you call it "invocatio" it is not very useful. We have corroborations on every contemporary legal record, public and private. We have indeed all classic charters elements, like the formula perpetuitatis ("forever" in our documents), which we call perpetuity statement, but we have additional elements that only apply to contemporary records, and we should leave space for them by structuring the DTD in a way that can accommodate elements within categories. Even if the elements are expressed alphabetically, the categorization can be inherent in a code where the first part is the general element and the second is its manifestation. If we build the encoding this way, once we will eventually get to born digital documents, we will have dedicated conceptual areas where to include the additional elements. In some cases, the elements are already there. For example, if instead of regestum we call the corresponding element "profile", it accommodates both the regestum and the metadata schema (which the regestum really is).
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.
I would not include laws.
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?
Already your CEI includes archival diplomatics. You have elements like the archival bond, expressed in the archival identifier, archival fonds, context, etc. What we call archival diplomatics is an extension of diplomatics that looks at the record in the context of the record aggregation of which it is part, and that uses the acquired knowledge for records creation and recordkeeping purposes. Of course, in doing so, archival diplomatics elaborates on all diplomatics concepts (e.g. 5 necessary persons, 5 necessary contexts, trustworthiness divided into reliability, accuracy, authenticity--divided in identity and integrity--and authentication), but it does not contradicts any of the concepts of classic diplomatics. This is why I said that we cannot miss the opportunity to do a service to the entire records professionals community...so, yes, one document type (the charter) in its many manifestations (documentary forms), but through time up to today and across countries. Believe me, we have worked on Chinese, Indian, Commonwealth, Italian and French charters, old and new....the differences are minimal, but the choice of Latin as the encoding language may be a block to recognizing this, and the acceptance of TEI terms that conflict with the diplomatic ones may be come back to haunt us.
Enriching the english diplomatic terminology would be a fine thing and I hope the scholarly community will understand and accept our proposals.
I sincerely hope so also. Gung Hay Fat Choi! Happy Chinese New Year! (today all Vancouver is colored in red celebrating the year of the Golden Pig...money and joy to the world and each and every one of you). 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/