Catching up with the discussion

[Patrick Sahle]

Dear all, 

I'm very sorry to have been abstinent to this discussion so far. I'll try
to catch up a little ...

1) Structure inside <tenor> (or whatever we will call it in the end). After
all the discussion I still don't like <seg> or <div> here. Michael and
Gautier have both raised good arguments against the respective elements. We
should keep in mind that in our work we try to markup a very specific view
on certain texts which is represented by an established vocabulary. <div>
and <seg>, although extremely generic, are to be used for "primary" views
on texts like global structures, layout structures and the like. In our
approach I see parallels to other analytical approaches to certain types of
texts (like drama, poems, spoken text etc.) or analytical perspectives
(like grammar or semantics). Just as those have created dedicated tags we
should try to establish things like <invocatio> or <protocol>. There is
another - more generic reason - for my proposal: I expect these elements to
be further differentiated in taxonomies of - for example - arengas or
eschatocols. Then we would have things like <div type="arenga"
subtype="xyz"> and although the concept of "subtype" already exists it is
one of the ugliest I know and contradicts the whole concept of hierarchical
markup, since it's (for example) not nested ... - So: I still strongly
raise a plea for the whole diplomatic formular (?) on the element-level!

2) Charter numbers only as attributes: No. Please keep in mind, that my
specific work regards mainly the digitisation of already printed (edited)
charters as collections in charter books. There are numerous systems and
ways of naming or numbering these charters. I have to bee able to keep and
represent these systems. And I need the n-ATTRIBUTE to establish another,
internal, global, synthetic numbering system. So I would still need a
special element for these things - but I don't know how to call it. Any
suggestions?

3.) Elongata as <hi type="elongata">. D'accord.

4.) facsimilia, prints, regesta, studies etc. as <listbibl>. Yes, that's
what I proposed earlier. But we should press the TEI to allow a
type-attribute for which we should provide a taxonomy. To use
"n=printedEditions" would be a clear misuse of the semantics of the
TEI-system, Gautier. Maybe we can even find allies for this case: There is
work going on in the manuscript description (formerly known as MASTER)
section of the TEI and I'm pretty sure that there are similar phenomena in
Manuscript-Catalogues.

5.) <document> - After your discussion I have changed my mind and now do
think that
 <group>
     <text type="charter"> 
would indeed be good solution!

6.) I'm somewhat unhappy with <regestum>. As far as I have understood this
would contain ALL the information on a given charter except the text? Then
we would have an extremely wide notion of "regestum" since this would
include all bibliographic reference, description of physical phenomena,
discussion of authenticity, discussion of the content of a charter and so
on. Is this really the common use of the word "regestum"? I have some doubts.
Maybe we can find a more generic word? And the restrict <regestum> to what
it really means: the short summary of the main information of a given
charter. And for this, the word has a perfectly clear and specific notion
and should be an element rather than an attribute  of another already
established element.

7.) There are a lot of other points I would like to comment on. But I think
we should first try to bowl down some of the open questions that have been
raised so far ...

8.) Dear Michael Margolin:
> 2. Cartulary and Document.
>         In my understanding the subject of XML encoding is a medieval
charter
>which might belong to one or more cartularies. From the implementation
point of
>view it would be unwise to encode multiple charters (cartulary) in the one
text
>file where some special elements (like <div>) would mark boundaries of
the each
>charter. Therefore each given charter encoding should the only include a
>references to parent cartularies. The common approach to implementation of
the
>repository of charters is to create an independent database (or file system)
>entry for the each charter.
** "to create an independent database (or file system)" is not THE common
approach. It is ONE out of many approaches. As far as I can see there are
much more projects, dealing with much more material which start with
digitising already printed charter editions and have two goals: to keep all
the information of the printed version and to make them available for
systematic computer aided reasearch. And - well - then we have the approach
Gautier stands for: creating new charter editions from scratch, but seeing
things like a cartulaire as the primary information unit and not the
"abstract" charter - which indeed can have several witnesses, documents and
versions. I believe that the strength of our group is, that we perfectly
represent these different approaches. But we should try to solve the
problems of ALL of us. Of course this raises elementary problems - coming
back to your posting: "the subject of XML encoding is a medieval charter".
Yes, sometimes. And sometimes it's a charter book (cartulaire) and
sometimes it's a single charter in an archive and sometimes (maybe most
often) it's a printed collection of charters ...

Best regards, 

Patrick Sahle

___________________________________________________________________
Universität zu Köln
Historisches Seminar
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Koeln

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Sahle at uni-koeln.de
http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ahz26/