Re: [tei-council] MsPart Comments

On Feb 23, 2015, at 12:04 , Fabio Ciotti wrote:

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Hoping to spark some comment. As you might expect, I'm *strongly* in favor of permitting the use of msPart for describing fragments, so all I have are quibbles:

I have objected against this at the last f2f meeting, and I still am at odd with this, since these extension could conflict with well established manuscript description traditions. F. ex. all the manuscript description applications I have seen have the concept of composite ms, while there is no notion of scattered or dispersed ms (virtually reconstructed). There is an ontological rationale in this, since from a codicological perspective ms are real physical objects (item in FRBR parlance), not abstract entities.

I'd feel better with a new element with a clear semantic, but in the end I think that using <msPart> with a mandatory @type attribute can do the job.

I agree it probably makes no sense from a manuscript perspective, but it makes total sense to a papyrologist or epigraphist, to whom these are also real physical objects. They’ve just been smashed. Take a look at http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph040004.html http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph040004.html, for example, where the inscribed architrave is in several chunks. This is one text that is no longer in one piece.

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1) I don't thing the distinction should be "composite" vs. "dispersed". The fragments of a broken up (e.g. papyrus) text aren't necessarily scattered (though they may be), but the text *is* in bits rather than joined or bound together, and those bits may each have their own identifiers and their own histories.

I do not have enough English sensitivity to give my opinion here, to me dispersed and scattered are very similar. Maybe divided as Raffaele suggests is better since it is more general term

To me dispersed and scattered are very similar too. Divided or fragmentary might be better.

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2) In the proposed text rewording "only remaining fragment of a former codex", the word "codex" excludes papyri and inscriptions.

Yes but the scope of msDesc module is the description of manuscript like object, not of general text bearing object. There is pending proposal to have such an element form ontology SIG, and I am not sure squeezing msDesc is the right way to go.

I think that ship has sailed. In the absence of a good alternative, people have been using msDesc for things that aren’t codices for a few years now. I fear I’m one of them :-).

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