Hi TEI Council,


Minor changes:

As you know I'm finishing off the tei:object element introduction and I've made a number of requested changes. I modified objIdentifier to objectIdentifier, added some more prose including a note in the prose of the Guidelines saying: 

"Please note: The object element is a recent addition to the TEI Guidelines and as such may be more prone to further revision as its use develops. This may be particularly evident where its contents borrowed from msDesc have yet to be generalized from their use in the context of manuscript descriptions."


(I've made a note to myself to remove this at a later date.) Perhaps I should also put it as a remark on the object element specification page. 


Lots of minor changes:

One of the legacy problems about basing object descriptions on (and as a more general form of) manuscript description is that numerous of the descendants of object specify in their descriptions that they are specifically to do with manuscripts. Often quite unnecessarily so. This is *already* out of date because with elements like typeDesc and typeNote we explicitly recommend the use of msDesc for objects which are not manuscripts (but early printed books, clay tablets, etc.).  


To solve this problem I've gone through all of the elements instantiated by the manuscript description chapter and rephrased any manuscript-specific terminology in the most minimal way possible. In almost all the cases this involved merely inserting 'or other object' after the word 'manuscript'. In some cases the description already said 'manuscript or manuscript part' and I changed this to 'manuscript, manuscript part, or other object'. Generally the changes were fairly simple, for example with the 'institution' element I changed it from:

===

<desc versionDate="2007-04-26" xml:lang="en">contains the name of an organization such as a university or library, with which a manuscript is identified, generally its holding institution.</desc>
===
to:
===
<desc versionDate="2019-01-17" xml:lang="en">contains the name of an organization such as a university or library, with which a manuscript or other object is identified, generally its holding institution.</desc>
===

A list of all of the changes as a single commit is at:

https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/commit/41e7ce9ff35fd584eb3b314398a223987a04f5b0

if anyone wishes to check through them.

In some cases (such as institution above) it might be better if instead of a phrase like 'manuscript or other object' or indeed 'manuscript, manuscript part, or other object' we just changed it to 'object'.  i.e. above "contains the name of an organization such as a university or library, with which an object is identified, generally its holding institution". The reason I've not done this at the moment is to maintain the transparency of the legacy of these elements originating from the manuscript description module. (And indeed, one does not get these elements inside object unless that module is loaded -- which is fine to me.) 

Dimensions:
On a related but slightly different issue, while going through the elements instantiated by the manuscript description module I reminded myself that dimensions, dim, height, width, and depth are all instantiated by this module even though I believe they are used by people not doing manuscript descriptions. I believe it might be worth revisiting their descriptions and consider moving them to the core module or similar at some point.  One of the things that I noticed is that the descriptions of height, width, and depth are specific to text-bearing objects. So without change, for example, I could not provide the height, width, depth of an object that has not got any text on it. The descriptions are:

===
<depth> contains a measurement measured across the spine of a book or codex, or (for other text-bearing objects) perpendicular to the measurement given by the width element.
<height> contains a measurement measured along the axis at right angles to the bottom of the written surface, i.e. parallel to the spine for a codex or book.
<width> contains a measurement measured along the axis parallel to the bottom of the written surface, i.e. perpendicular to the spine of a book or codex.
===

I'm happy to put in an issue about this but potential generalising rewording might be:
===
<depth> contains a measurement from the front to the back of an object, perpendicular to the measurement given by the <width> element.
<height> contains a measurement measured along the axis at a right angle to the bottom of the object.
<width> contains a measurement of an object along the axis parallel to its bottom, e.g. perpendicular to the spine of a book or codex.
===

I'll stick this last bit in an issue.


Many thanks,

James 


--

Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities

School of English, Newcastle University