Element choices

[MKlamer]

I'm still working through which items I want to tag with elements in the text. So far, I've been basically copying what we do for Mitford. I've coded changes made to the text, places where the spelling differs from standard, proper names and titles - though I may have missed some of the latter.

Other possibilities: I'm wondering whether to encode each instance of Gaskell and her daughters throughout the text, since it's a motherhood narrative, to make them easier to find. Is this unnecessary work? Gaskell often falls into a pattern of addressing God at the end of the entries. I thought about encoding these with a "prayer" tag to mark those moments in which the voice of the text shifts, but I'm not sure which tag to use.

[setriplette]

The good thing about doing something like a <motherhood> element would be that you could highlight those sections in your web view or otherwise display them. I'm not sure if that would cause hierarchy problems because there might be multiple running paragraphs about Gaskell's interactions with her daughters. You might do something like tag their names, so that they could be highlighted that way.

[ebeshero]

@setriplette I just added the tick marks around your element name so it is now visible in your comment! (That tick mark is usually in the top left of a keyboard...and @MKlamer we need it in markdown to render angle bracket code literally. You can also use multiple tick marks to set a longer code block in an issue for us to look at. It is easy to forget them, so I just quickly added them to Stacey’s post—nice that GitHub let’s us do that.)

Okay, you could invent an element like motherhood, which is not in the TEI, but it is probably better to work with the way TEI does things. Because topical encoding is limitless, it is impossible for a standard shared vocabulary for element names to predict every topic that encoders would want to mark. So in TEI what we have are elements for structural things like paragraphs and lines (for verse) and a few handy all-purpose elements like <ab>, which means “anonymous block” for any chunk of prose text that is not a paragraph. You can come up with an attribute on a structural element to hold topical classifications and make up your own list of terms to use. I think we may want to look at defining a list of classes that you can reference with maybe a @class attribute...

[ebeshero]

@MKlamer @setriplette This is timely because we have an open issue on the TEI Guidelines GitHub about expanding our range of examples and uses of the <classDecl> element, which sits up in the TEI header and lists out classification codes of any kind that are applied in attributes in the text. I have a TEI Council assignment (or “open ticket”) to add some more examples of usage, and you can see an example volunteered from the Shelley-Godwin Archive in our discussion of the ticket. The Guidelines examples (including the new one from Shelley-Godwin) emphasize classifications used elsewhere in the teiHeader, BUT we are looking for examples defining classifications to use in the body of text, too. Maybe we can come up with a nice example from your project!