Dear all,

I went over the list and I can think of several additional elements that might be included and of alternative English terms to use. I noticed that some elements are expressed in Latin, some in English (some in new English, some in old English), some in English ...neologisms, and some in...sort of...English. Would it not be better to have all the terms in consistent modern English (even if we had to create a neologism, as long as the definition is clear and a unique correspondence to a classic diplomatics term is shown)? This would give stability to the vocabulary overtime so that, if one wished to use this encoding language for more recent records, or even for digital records, one would need additions but not changes.

Yes, of course. We will really have to clean up the terminology. But please keep in mind, that we are still at the very beginnig of the CEI-development. There is nothing really fixed with the DTD. It's just a first set of ideas and proposals. So for this period we should still collect further ideas and possible terms for elements, attributes and controlled (attribut) values. In another step we should then make the terminology more consistent, check for the the highest TEI-conformance possible (@Gautier), narrow down the DTD (provide an XML schema and maybe a relaxNG schema) and evaluate the proposed elements and structures with a set of examples ... Cari saluti a tutti, Patrick

Just my two cents...

Luciana

At 12:44 PM 14/02/2007, you wrote:

...

Dear colleagues,

to prepare our CEI meeting I have tried to build a final list of expressions that shold build our common vocabulary in charter encoding. You can find this list at

http://www.cei.lmu.de/taglib.php

We can build from this list a DTD as generic as possible as I did

http://www.ceil.mu.de/DTD/CEI.dtd

Please send all recommendations for alteration and emendation of these two texts to the list (cei-l@lists.lrz-muenchen.de)

At our meeting I would like to discuss this list and decide on a recommendation that could drafted as follows (emendation by native speakers strongly desired!):

The CEI recommends to use for any encoding of medieval and early moden charters the folling vocabulary. The CEI agrees that there are many different ways to encode charters and many good standards to stay conform with. Thus the CEI does not consider the list a prescriptive tag list with a definite hierarchy. The vocabulary could be used as element names, as attribute names or as attribute values. If you want to encode medieval or early modern charters the CEI invites you to use a DTD build of this tag list (http://www.cei.lmu.de/taglib.php) and that would be properly for the purpose of the CEI. We consider any encoding that can be validated with this DTD as "CEI-compliant". We consider any encoding that can be mapped to this CEI using XSLT as "CEI-ready".

The meeting of the CEI will have the following agenda:

1. "formalities" (Sorry, I don't know the correct english expression for "Festlegung der Tagesordnung", "Feststellung der Beschlußfähigkeit" and all these democratic formalities that are common for formal meetings - but I'm sure, our meeting won't be as formal as this agenda!) 2. developing and testing of the common vocabulary - reports 3. adopt the common vocabulary and the above proposed recommendation 4. varia

I hope we can finish the meeting before lunch.

I will prepare a litte bit on the topic 2 and 3 but would be happy if anybody of you could contribute too - just send me a short message.

I'm happy to inform you that we have again a interpreting team for french, italien, german contributions into english. I hope that will keep the discussion lively.

I would like to invite the initial CEI-group (Michele Ansani, Bernhard Assmann, Micheal Gervers, Andreas Gniffke, Andreas Kuczera, Michael Margolin, Christian-Emil Ore, Gautier Poupeau, Karsten Uhde, Anrea Rapp, Patrick Sahle) to preside the meeting together with me although all of you are invited to take part on discussions and voting.

I hope you can all agree with the agenda and I'm looking forward to meet you in Munich

Georg

--

------------------------------------- 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

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/

Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Projekt "Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierte Drucke" (zvdd) - http://www.zvdd.de Projekt "Online-Portal für digitalisierte Kulturgüter in Niedersachsen" (OPAL) - http://www.opal-niedersachsen.de Abteilung DD18 / RDD Papendiek 14 37073 Goettingen Tel.: +49 - (0)551 - 39-13789 Fax: +49 - (0)551 - 39-3856 sahle (at) sub.uni-goettingen.de Privat: Görlitzer Str. 18 37085 Göttingen +49 - (0)551 - 3709303 Sahle (at) uni-koeln.de

Hello, I'm happy that a discussion started already - the time on Saturday 3rd is, as I said in my announcement - limited, so the better the proposal the faster the decisions. Althoug Patrick is right, that this is only the starting point for a common standard (I tend number the version with 0.1) I would suggest, that everybody sends his suggestions now and I will try to track them - setting up a consolidated version for our meeting at the end of next week. So please send your suggestions for A) change of element names (to get a consistend language - although I'm sure that English isn't the best choice for diplomatic terms ... have a look at http://pcghw51.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/UrkDTD/VID.php for a very raw online version of the Vocabulaire Internationale de Diplomatique. B) new elements to be added (please give a short description what the element should contain and how it is distinguished from similar elements). C) Comments on existing elements (how to make the description more precise, problems to be expected etc. etc.) to the list. All the best Georg Luciana Duranti schrieb:

Hello Patrick (and everybody else on the list):

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I was thinking that the most important distinction we need to make is between elements of form (on the face of the record) and metadata (identifying attributes) required to establish and maintain the identity and integrity of the digital version and to retrieve it efficiently. A typical example: when I saw <auth> I thought author, but no, it was authentication. So I thought that it made sense because the name of the author is a necessary identifying attribute that may or may not express itself as an element of form (e.g. subscription, superscription, signature, entitling, etc.), while authentication always expresses itself as an element of form, and the list, being a DTD, is meant to include only elements of form. However, for that purpose, isn't authentication too broad a concept? For tagging a document we should express all the elements of form in which authentication may be expressed and we should confine the term authentication to a metadata term....oh, just thinking aloud. I guess that all these things (e.g. level of granularity) will be discussed at the meeting...correct?

Many greetings back and of course saluti a tutti coloro che leggono, con molte scuse for clogging your mailboxes (how is this as an expression of multicultralism?)

Luciana

At 01:18 AM 16/02/2007, you wrote:

...

Dear all,

...

I went over the list and I can think of several additional elements that might be included and of alternative English terms to use. I noticed that some elements are expressed in Latin, some in English (some in new English, some in old English), some in English ...neologisms, and some in...sort of...English. Would it not be better to have all the terms in consistent modern English (even if we had to create a neologism, as long as the definition is clear and a unique correspondence to a classic diplomatics term is shown)? This would give stability to the vocabulary overtime so that, if one wished to use this encoding language for more recent records, or even for digital records, one would need additions but not changes.

Yes, of course. We will really have to clean up the terminology. But please keep in mind, that we are still at the very beginnig of the CEI-development. There is nothing really fixed with the DTD. It's just a first set of ideas and proposals. So for this period we should still collect further ideas and possible terms for elements, attributes and controlled (attribut) values. In another step we should then make the terminology more consistent, check for the the highest TEI-conformance possible (@Gautier), narrow down the DTD (provide an XML schema and maybe a relaxNG schema) and evaluate the proposed elements and structures with a set of examples ...

Cari saluti a tutti,

Patrick

...

Just my two cents...

Luciana

At 12:44 PM 14/02/2007, you wrote:

...

Dear colleagues,

to prepare our CEI meeting I have tried to build a final list of expressions that shold build our common vocabulary in charter encoding. You can find this list at

http://www.cei.lmu.de/taglib.php

We can build from this list a DTD as generic as possible as I did

http://www.ceil.mu.de/DTD/CEI.dtd

Please send all recommendations for alteration and emendation of these two texts to the list (cei-l@lists.lrz-muenchen.de)

At our meeting I would like to discuss this list and decide on a recommendation that could drafted as follows (emendation by native speakers strongly desired!):

The CEI recommends to use for any encoding of medieval and early moden charters the folling vocabulary. The CEI agrees that there are many different ways to encode charters and many good standards to stay conform with. Thus the CEI does not consider the list a prescriptive tag list with a definite hierarchy. The vocabulary could be used as element names, as attribute names or as attribute values. If you want to encode medieval or early modern charters the CEI invites you to use a DTD build of this tag list (http://www.cei.lmu.de/taglib.php) and that would be properly for the purpose of the CEI. We consider any encoding that can be validated with this DTD as "CEI-compliant". We consider any encoding that can be mapped to this CEI using XSLT as "CEI-ready".

The meeting of the CEI will have the following agenda:

1. "formalities" (Sorry, I don't know the correct english expression for "Festlegung der Tagesordnung", "Feststellung der Beschlußfähigkeit" and all these democratic formalities that are common for formal meetings - but I'm sure, our meeting won't be as formal as this agenda!) 2. developing and testing of the common vocabulary - reports 3. adopt the common vocabulary and the above proposed recommendation 4. varia

I hope we can finish the meeting before lunch.

I will prepare a litte bit on the topic 2 and 3 but would be happy if anybody of you could contribute too - just send me a short message.

I'm happy to inform you that we have again a interpreting team for french, italien, german contributions into english. I hope that will keep the discussion lively.

I would like to invite the initial CEI-group (Michele Ansani, Bernhard Assmann, Micheal Gervers, Andreas Gniffke, Andreas Kuczera, Michael Margolin, Christian-Emil Ore, Gautier Poupeau, Karsten Uhde, Anrea Rapp, Patrick Sahle) to preside the meeting together with me although all of you are invited to take part on discussions and voting.

I hope you can all agree with the agenda and I'm looking forward to meet you in Munich

Georg

--

------------------------------------- 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

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/

Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Projekt "Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierte Drucke" (zvdd) - http://www.zvdd.de Projekt "Online-Portal für digitalisierte Kulturgüter in Niedersachsen" (OPAL) - http://www.opal-niedersachsen.de Abteilung DD18 / RDD Papendiek 14 37073 Goettingen Tel.: +49 - (0)551 - 39-13789 Fax: +49 - (0)551 - 39-3856 sahle (at) sub.uni-goettingen.de

Privat: Görlitzer Str. 18 37085 Göttingen +49 - (0)551 - 3709303 Sahle (at) uni-koeln.de

-- ------------------------------------- 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

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

Dear Luciana,

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).

Do you think, you could extract from the DTD a list of those elements (element names) which you feel uncomfortable with? Together with proposals for better names? Best, Patrick Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Projekt "Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierte Drucke" (zvdd) - http://www.zvdd.de Projekt "Online-Portal für digitalisierte Kulturgüter in Niedersachsen" (OPAL) - http://www.opal-niedersachsen.de Abteilung DD18 / RDD Papendiek 14 37073 Goettingen Tel.: +49 - (0)551 - 39-13789 Fax: +49 - (0)551 - 39-3856 sahle (at) sub.uni-goettingen.de Privat: Görlitzer Str. 18 37085 Göttingen +49 - (0)551 - 3709303 Sahle (at) uni-koeln.de

Dear colleagues, To the discussion of the last few days here are some comments from an archivist: 1. I agree that the question of element names isn't the most important. On the other hand: even now it is important to understand the element names. Otherwise we will discuss different things (please remember our discussion last time in Munich about "witness"). 2. In my eyes, we should not look too much to TEI. We can just as well take EAD (Encoded Archival Description) as a reference, or those standards Patric named in his last mail. But all these standards are not made for describing charters and that is what we originally wanted to do. Now, a lot of the elements in our list are only in it because we also want to put printed document books (? = Urkundenbuch/Urkundenedition = recueil de chartes = codice diplomatico [Vocabulaire international de la diplomatique No. 75]) online. I'm not sure that this is the right way. 3. In my eyes we first should concentrate on the elements we will need to describe a single charter, to make a transcription or an edition or an abstract and last but not least a description of all external and internal features. 4. If we are ready with this, we should try to find a way to use these elements also while putting printed document books online. At that point we should look again to TEI etc. to see which elements will be useful for us. 5. We should divide strictly 1) the text on a charter from 2) the physical description and 3)its metadata and so perhaps he should use something like this: <cei> <charter> <text>(with the transcription/edition and/or the abstract) <physdesc> (with the description of all external and internal features) <metadata> (with all data belonging to the authenticity of the document) Below you will find some comments to the current element list, I made before the discussion began to run more generally: 1. There must be the possibility to use <dateOrig> within <abstract> because in a lot of our older finding aids the original date is part of the abstract. 2. Why is <arch> part of <witness>? In my eyes we should always use <archidentifier> as a container for the four parts: town, archives, fond and single number etc. Also: the first element in the example must be: <archidentifier> and not <archstruct> (this mistake is also in archFond). 3. I think we should not use <idno> for the number of a document in an archives. It is not always a number but often a mixture of words and numbers. So, wy don't we use the word reference (=> Vocabulaire international de la diplomatique No. 33) and perhaps we can change it to <archreference> to make a distinction between this element and the <ref>-element. <idno> for a number within a edition etc. is o.k. for me. 4. In general: in my eyes, we should use more often different elements for different things; for example: to distinguish between the date of the charter and all other dates that are named within the text of a charter, or a line break in the original charter and a line break in a book where the charter is edited etc. 5. <issued> is "a container date and place". So why don't we make it in the following way: <chdesc> <issued> <issueddate> <issuedplace> In general: why don't we try to use similar names for those elements that are put together in one container like <issued> or <archidentifier>? e.g.: <archidentifier> <archlocation> <arch> <archfont> <archreference> 6. I can't find an element to mark an insert/vidimus/transsumpt(sorry: I can't find any English expression) but I think we need it. 7. There must be more different elements for the different graphical signs (or special signs as Luciana would say) and one must be able to use them also under <chdesk> or <diplomaticanalysis> and not only under <tenor> and <sealdesc> like <pict>. Karsten Dr. Karsten Uhde Archives School Marburg Bismarckstr. 32 35037 Marburg Germany Tel.: ++49 6421 16971-25 uhde@staff.uni-marburg.de