metadata: the tei header and manuscript...

The TEI Header Manuscript Description

Metadata: The TEI Header and ManuscriptDescription

TEI@Oxford

2010-07

Oxford TEI Summer School 2010 1/51


The TEI Header

The TEI header was designed with two goals in mind

needs of bibliographers and librarians trying to document‘electronic books’

needs of text analysts trying to document ‘coding practices’within digital resources

The result is that discussion of the header tends to be pulled in twodirections...



The Librarian’s Header

Conforms to standard bibliographic model, using similarterminology

Organized as a single source of information for bibliographicdescription of a digital resource, with established mappings toother such records (e.g. MARC)

Emerging code of best practice in its use, endorsed by majordigital collections

Pressure for greater and more exact constraints to improveprecision of description: preference for structured data overloose prose



Everyman’s Header

Gives a polite nod to common bibliographic practice, but has afar wider scope

Supports a (potentially) huge range of very miscellaneousinformation, organized in fairly ad hoc ways

Many different codes of practice in different user communities

Unpredictable combinations of narrowly encodeddocumentation systems and loose prose descriptions



TEI Header Structure

The TEI header has four main components:

< leDesc> ( le description) contains a full bibliographicdescription of an electronic le.

(encoding description) documents therelationship between an electronic text and the source orsources from which it was derived.

(text-pro le description) provides a detaileddescription of non-bibliographic aspects of a text, speci callythe languages and sublanguages used, the situation in whichit was produced, the participants and their setting. (just abouteverything not covered in the other header elements

(revision description) summarizes the revisionhistory for a le.

Only < leDesc> is required; the others are optional.



Example Header: Minimal required header

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A title?

Who published?

Where from?



The TEI supports two ‘levels’ or types of header

corpus levelmetadata sets default properties for everything ina corpus

text levelmetadata sets speci c properties for one componenttext of a corpus



Corpus Header Example

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Types of content in the TEI header

free proseprose description: series of paragraphsphrase: character data, interspersed with phrase-levelelements, but not paragraphs

grouping elements: specialised elements recording somestructured information

declarations: Elements whose names end with the suffix Decl(e.g. subjectDecl, refsDecl) enclose information about speci cencoding practices applied in the electronic text.

descriptions: Elements whose names end with the suffix Desc(e.g. , ) contain a prosedescription, possibly, but not necessarily, organised undersome speci c headings by suggested sub-elements.



File Description

has some mandatory parts:: provides a title for the resource and any associatedstatements of responsibility: documents the sources from which theencoded text derives (if any): documents how the encoded text ispublished or distributed

and some optional ones:: yes, electronic texts have editions too: and they also t into "series".: how many oppy disks, gigabits, les?: notes of various types



The File Description

: contains a mandatory which identi es theelectronic le (not its source!)

optionally followed by additional titles, and by ‘statements ofresponsibility’, as appropriate, using , ,, , or the generic : may contain

plain text (e.g. to say the text is unpublished)one or more , , , eachfollowed by , , ,



A minimal header for Punch

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Punch, or the London Charivari: an electronic

editionOwen Seaman (1861-1936)

TEI versionTEI@Oxford team

Unpublished

Recoded from the Project Gutenberg versions



Title- and Responsibility- statements...

There may be many of them:.

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ArtameneLe Grand CyrusDigital Edition

Amongst the guilty parties:.

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Scudery, Madeleine deGeffin, AlexandreFonds Nationale Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique

Encoding checkJean Untel



example

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TEI ConsortiumOxford Text Archive1256

Available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution and

Share Alike licence.



example

can contain notes on almost any aspect:.

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Material prepared for the TEI@Oxford Summer School.



The Source DescriptionAll electronic works need to indicate their source, even if it is just tosay that it is 'born digital'. There are variety of ways to do this:

prose description

: contains free text or any mixture of bibliographicelements such as , etc.

contains effectively the same elements butconstrained in various ways according to bibliographicstandards

special-cases texts which were born TEI byreplicating an embedded < leDesc>

A may be used for lists of such descriptions

Specialised elements for spoken texts ( etc.)and for manuscripts () Discussed later!

Authority lists for e.g people () or places() can be included.



examples

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Born digital.

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Enigma, Punch: or the

London Charivari, July 1,1914, 147, p. 6



vs. Example

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Enigma, in Punch: or the

London Charivari (July 1, 1914), vol 147, pp. 1-20

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Enigma

Punch: or the London Charivari

LondonJuly 1, 19141471-20



Encoding Description

groups notes about the procedures used whenthe text was encoded, either summarised in prose or within speci celements such as

: goals of the project

: sampling principles

: editorial principals, e.g. ,, , ,,

: classi cation system/s used

: speci cs about usage of particular elements

The can replace the user manual, or facilitatesemi-automatic document management, given agreed codes ofpractice.



Example (1).

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The Imaginary Punch Project aims to ....

All pages containing editorial text have been

transcribed in full. Pages containing only advertisements orillustrations have been omitted.

Original spelling has been retained, except that

words hyphenated across line breaks have been silentlyre-assembled. The hyphen has been retained only where thereexist cases of the same word being hyphenated in mid-lineposition.



Example (2).

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story occupies more than half a page

story occupies between quarter and a half page

story occupies less than a quarter page

Refers to domestic political events

Refers to foreign political events

refers to role of women in society

refers to role of servants in society



Pro le Description

A collection of descriptions, categorised only as ‘non-bibliographic’.Default members of the model.pro leDescPart class include:

: information about the origination of theintellectual content of the text, e.g. time and place

: information about languages, registers, writingsystems etc used in the text

and : classi cations applied to the textby means of a list of speci ed criteria or by means of acollection of pointers, respectively

and : information about the‘participants’, either real or depicted, in the text

: information about the hands identi ed in amanuscript



Language and character set usage

The element is provided to document usage oflanguages in the text. Languages are identi ed by their ISO codes:.

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EnglishFrenchBulgarian in Cyrillic characters Romanized Bulgarian



Classi cation Methods

provides a classi cation (by domain, medium, topic...)for the whole of a text expressed in one or more of the followingways:

using direct reference to a locally de ned (e.g. in thecorpus header) category

using reference to some commonly agreed andexternally de ned category (e.g. UDC)

using assign arbitrary descriptive terms taken from abibliographic controlled vocabulary or a tag cloud



BNC Example.

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W nonAc: humanities arts

History, Modern - 19th centuryCapitalism - History - 19th centuryWorld, 1848-1875

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This categorization applies to the whole text. For more ne grainedclassi cation, use@decls on e.g. a element.



Revision Description

A list of elements, each with a@date and@whoattributes, indicating signi cant stages in the evolution of adocument.

Most recent rst.

Can be maintained manually, but better done by means of aCMS (change management system)

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$LastChangedDate: 2010-06-28 09:14:36 +0100 (Mon, 28 Jun

2010) $.$LastChangedBy: lou $$LastChangedRevision: 10346 $



Manuscript Description

Why are manuscripts special?

Manuscripts are unique objects, often of great cultural orpolitical value.

Books, by contrast, exist in multiple copies, and can bedescribed adequately by well-established and formalisedbibliographic conventions.

For manuscripts, there are several traditions, often descriptiveor belle lettriste, and little consensus.

Similar concerns apply to other text-bearing objects.



Objectives of

The TEI element is intended for several different kinds ofapplications:

standalone database of library records ( nding aid)

discursive text collecting many records (catalogue raisonné)

metadata component within a digital surrogate (electronicedition)

tool for ‘quantitative codicology’



Catalogue Raisonné

An can appear anywhere a

paragraph can.

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The Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection

The Arnamagnæan Collection is widely recognised as one of the

most significant collections of early Scandinavian manuscripts inthe world…

Among its more important holdings are:

In the following manuscript….



Having one's cake and eating it

Two con icting desires:

preserve (or perpetuate) existing descriptive prose

reliable search, retrieval, and analysis of data

The tries, wherever possible, to do both of these things.



Components of a manuscript descriptionWithin the element come a required element, which groups information identifying the manuscript,followed by an optional , which can be used to provide in abrief, unstructured way information on the manuscript's contentsetc. These are then followed either by one or more paragraphs(

), or one or more of the following specialised elements:

: an itemised list of the intellectual content ofthe manuscript, with transcriptions of rubrics, incipits, explicitsetc, as well as primary bibliographic references

: groups information concerning all physicalaspects of the manuscript, its material, size, format, script,decoration, binding, marginalia etc.

: provides information on the history of themanuscript, its origin, provenance and acquisition by itsholding institution



Components of a manuscript description (cont.)

: groups other information about the manuscript,in particular, administrative information relating to itsavailability, custodial history, surrogates etc.

: contains in essence a nested , in cases ofcomposite manuscripts now regarded as constituting a singleunit but made up of two or more parts which were originallyphysically distinct.

Within each of these elements a number of sub-elements isavailable; , for example, will normally consist of oneor more elements, each in turn containing speci celements for , , and , aswell as the standard TEI elements , and forbibliographic references. As with itself, however,the contents of these rst-level and second-level elements need notbe this structured, since there is also the option of using paragraphs.



Identi cation (1)

The

Traditional three part speci cation:

place (, , )

repository (, )

identi er (, ).

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CanadaOttawaLibrary and Archives CanadaE.W.B. MorrisonMG 30 E 81 v. 16



Identi cation (2)

Alternative or additional names can also be included:.

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DanmarkKøbenhavn Det ArnamagnæanskeInstitut AM 45 fol.Codex FrisianusFríssbók



Intellectual ContentMay simply use paragraphs of text…

… or a tree of elements

… optionally preceded by a prose summary

We can describe the content in general terms:.

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An extraordinary charivari of heroic deeds and improving tales,

including an early version of Guy of Warwick andseveral hymns.

or we can provide detail about each distinct item:.

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An extraordinary charivari of heroic deeds, improving

tales, and hymns.



The element

Manuscripts contain identi able items, usually physically tied to alocus.

, if present, must be given rstthen any of the following, in a speci ed order:

, , , , , ,< nalRubric>, , , , , …… or nested s



with multiple s

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fols. 5r-7vAn ABC

fols. 7v-8vLenvoy de Chaucer a

Scogan

fols. 14r-126vTroilus and CriseydeBk. 1:71-Bk. 5:1701, with additional losses due to

mutilation throughout



Physical Description

An arti cial (but helpful) grouping of many distinct items.

You can simply supply paragraphs of prose, covering such topics as

: the physical carrier

: what is carried on it

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: accompanying material

Or, group your discussion within the speci c elements mentionedabove.

Similarly, within the speci c elements, you can supply paragraphsof prose, or further speci c elements.



The carrier 1

The can contain just paragraphs, or and .

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Early modern parchment andpaper.



The carrier 2

A more complex substructure with speci c elements for ,, , , .Multiple layouts may also be speci ed:.

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Between 25 and 32 ruled

lines.

Between 34 and 50 ruled

lines.



and

(note on hand) describes a particular style orhand distinguished within a manuscript.

contains a note describing either a decorativecomponent of a manuscript or a fairly homogenous class ofsuch components.



example (1)

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The manuscript is written in two contemporary hands, otherwise

unknown, but clearly those of practised scribes. Hand I writesff.1r-22v and hand II ff. 23 and 24. Some scholars, notablyVerner Dahlerup and Hreinn Benediktsson, have argued for a thirdhand on f. 24, but the evidence for this is insubstantial.



example (2)

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The first part of the manuscript, fols

1v-72v:4, is written in a practised IcelandicGothic bookhand. This hand is not found elsewhere.

The second part of the manuscript,

fols 72v:4-194, is written in a handcontemporary with the first; it can also be found in afragment of Knýtlinga saga, AM 20b II

fol..



The element can be used to list or describe anyadditions to the manuscript, such as marginalia, scribblings,doodles, etc., which are considered to be of interest or importance..

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The text of this manuscript is not interpolated with sentences

from Royal decrees promulgated in 1294, 1305 and 1314. In themargins, however, another somewhat later scribe has added therelevant paragraphs of these decrees, see pp. 8, 24, 44, 47etc.

As a humorous gesture the scribe in one opening of themanuscript, pp. 36 and 37, has prolonged the lower stems of oneletter f and five letters þ and has them drizzle down themargin.



(accompanying material) contains details of anysigni cant additional material which may be closely associated withthe manuscript being described, such as non-contemporaneousdocuments or fragments bound in with the manuscript at someearlier historical period..

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A copy of a tax form from 1947 is included in the envelopewith the letter. It is not catalogued separately.



: where it all began

: everything in between

: how you acquired it

is datable element and thus has attributes@notBefore and@notAfter,@when etc.



Example

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Written in England in the

13th cent.

On fol. 54v very faint is Iste liber est fratris guillelmi

de buria de Roberti ordinisfratrum Predicatorum

, 14th cent. (?):hanauilla is written at the foot of the page (15th

cent.).

Bought from the Rev. W. D. Macray

on March 17, 1863, for 1 pound10s.



information

: administrative information

: information about other surrogates, i.e.photographs, digital images etc.

: accompanying material

: bibliography



Administrative information

record history

availability

custodial history

miscellaneous remarks

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Conserved between March 1961 and February 1963 at Birgitte

Dalls Konserveringsværksted.

Photographed in May 1988 by AMI/FA.



And nally

A can contain , essentially a nested ,where originally distinct manuscripts or parts of a manuscripts havebeen brought together to form a composite manuscript..

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AmiensBibliothèque MunicipaleMS 3Maurdramnus Bible

MS 6



ConclusionsThe TEI header was originally conceived as something fornon-specialist usage but has everything needed for rigorousbibliographic descriptionIt provides detailed methods for encoding specialist itemssuch as manuscript descriptions or details concerning spokentexts or linguist corporaStandard codes of practice or ways of using have beendeveloped by particular user communities (e.g. digitallibrarians, corpus linguists)As a ‘primary source of information’ it remains an essentialframework for documenting:

what your text iswhere it came fromhow you encoded ithow it may be used (technically)how it may be used (legally)


The TEI HeaderManuscript Description

metadata: the tei header and manuscript...

Documents