Date Formatting

[hilaryhavens]

On line 82 of the XML, it reads: Month, Day YYYY This does not seem consistent. I have been formatting the date as YYYY-MM-DD to match the template in quotation marks, but I just wanted to confirm that this is correct, and if so, can I update the template?

[mlhale7]

I was looking at the metadata sheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wKf7jFcg5lZfrcpP8xiG5QDBXrlwk4Mh-3JRIaI1HjU/edit?usp=sharing and matching how we dealt with date there. Looking again though, it doesn't look like we always dealt with dates consistently in the title. For instance, for Boston this is a title "Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Sir James McGregor, January 2nd, 1835" while for Birmingham this is a title "Letter from Maria Edgeworth to John Bowring, 4/23/1822". Ultimately inconsistency in these titles is irrelevant, but I was attempting to match what we were doing for the metadata.

It is not important that the value within the date element matches the value within the @when attribute. One (@when) needs to be machine readable and follow a convention like EDTF (YYYY-MM-DD), while the other should really be what is written on the letter itself in terms of date and be more human readable. According to the TEI guidelines, <date> can contain a date in any format (https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-date.html). The when attribute needs to be in a standard form - https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.datable.w3c.html

I'm happy to change anything. I haven't required Pull Requests to make changes on any of these files, so I could also go through with you how you can update. Still, I'm happy to change it to what you think is best to avoid the hassle of using GitHub.

[hilaryhavens]

Great! Thanks for the clarification - we'll make sure to keep the date as YYYY-MM-DD in the @when attribute and match the prose to the letter. In this case, it looks like the date formatting here is not intended to match the text on the page, so in light of this, is it okay if I revise that line (82) to this for clarity:

date when="YYYY-MM-DD" !--Write numerical date in @when attribute and put it in prose here in "Month Day, YYYY" format-- /date [I took out all the angled brackets because the text wasn't appearing, but I know to put 6 of them back in]

[mlhale7]

Thanks for this @hilaryhavens. I've gone ahead and updated the template to reflect what you suggested. What I had before definitely didn't indicate to transcribe what you see. Let me know if I've left anything off or misunderstood.

[mlhale7]

Reopen this issue if there's anything left unaddressed.