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The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines
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`@datingPoint` is under-documented in the Guidelines #2213

Open hcayless opened 2 years ago

hcayless commented 2 years ago

There's no discussion of the @datingPoint attribute from att.datable.custom in the Guidelines, it isn't linked in the att.datable.custom schemaSpec in the Names and Dates chapter, and there are no examples.

The point of the attribute seems to be to provide an anchor for relative dates (e.g., all the dates given in a document are relative to an event). This is a feature that could be very useful for documenting alternative chronologies, so I'm a bit surprised it wasn't elaborated on further when it was introduced.

sydb commented 2 years ago

This attribute was added in 523a103fa5dca491a8433b5530d9e993f2ab4c5e by @gabrielbodard on 25 Nov 2011.

martinascholger commented 2 years ago

Council F2F: @martindholmes and @bleekere will come up with an example to clarify the usage of @datingPoint. There is a branch on mentioning @datingPoint in the Guidelines.

ebeshero commented 2 years ago

Work is proceeding on this branch: https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/tree/issue-2213

martindholmes commented 2 years ago

@bleekere I was tasked at the F2F with providing an example of @datingMethod. These are genuine examples in a couple of sentences from John Stow's A Survey of London, 1598:

<name rendition="#stow_1598_CORN1_R" ref="mol:HOUG1">Peter Houghton</name> late Al<lb type="hyphenInWord"/>derman is
               now buried in their vault <date rendition="#stow_1598_CORN1_R" when-custom="1596" datingMethod="mol:julianSic" calendar="mol:julianSic">1596</date>. <name rendition="#stow_1598_CORN1_R" ref="mol:GRAC5">Iohn Grace</name> Draper<lb/> was
               buried <date rendition="#stow_1598_CORN1_R" when-custom="1439" datingMethod="mol:julianSic" calendar="mol:julianSic">1439</date>.

If I take out everything that's not directly relevant, that would be:

Peter Houghton late Alderman is  now buried in their vault <date when-custom="1596" datingMethod="mol:julianSic" calendar="mol:julianSic">1596</date>. Iohn Grace Draper was buried <date when-custom="1439" datingMethod="mol:julianSic" calendar="mol:julianSic">1439</date>.

The mol:julianSic pointer points via a prefixDef to:

<calendar xml:id="julianSic" n="Julian Sic">
          <p>The Julian calendar, in use in the British Empire until September 1752. This calendar is used for
          dates where the date of the beginning of the year is ambigious.</p>
        </calendar>

Note that @datingMethod specifies which calendar is used for @when-custom, whereas @calendar specifies the calendar used in the text content of the element; in this case, they are both using julianSic. In our content, the year in the Julian calendar was sometimes January 1, sometimes March 25, and in cases where we don't know which variant was being used, we use julianSic.

Is this a good enough example?

bleekere commented 2 years ago

Thank you @martindholmes ! You wouldn't happen to have a real-life example of the use of @datingPoint, by any chance?

bleekere commented 2 years ago

If @datingPoint supplies a pointer to an <event>, would this work?

<event xml:id="FIRE1" datingMethod="#julian" from-custom="1666-09-02" to-custom="1666-09-05">
            <head>The Great Fire of London</head>
            <p>The Great Fire of London burned through a large part 
          of the city of London. 
The fire left at least 65,0000 people homeless and the housing shortage
 caused rent prices in London to rise exponentially. 
<date from-custom="1666-09-05" to-custom="1666-09-19" datingPoint="#FIRE1">Within two weeks after the fire</date>, houses grew 10 times more expensive.</p>
          </event>
martindholmes commented 2 years ago

Sorry, I completely lost it there. I thought the ticket was for @datingMethod. I'll search but I don't remember using #datingPoint.

martindholmes commented 2 years ago

@bleekere I've grepped my entire project directory and can't find a single example of @datingPoint, with the exception of a backup from 2013 where it was used in error instead of @datingMethod. So I think we're looking at constructing an example. We do have some dates using the Anno Mundi calendar, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Mundi

I'm no expert on this, but the Wikipedia page says that the "reference point" (i.e. the dating point) for the Byzantine version of the AM calendar "is equivalent to 1 September 5509 BC on the Julian proleptic calendar." We could therefore enhance an Anno Mundi date like this:

<name style="font-style: italic;" ref="mol:BRUT1">Brute</name>, (being directed
          by a viſion in his ſleepe, to <lb/> finde out a country ſcituated<!--note type="editorial" resp="mol:MILL2">I.e., situated.</note--> in the <hi style="font-style: italic;">Weſt</hi>) with the
          <lb/> remaines of his <hi style="font-style: italic;">Troyan</hi> folowers, arriued and
            Lan<lb type="hyphenInWord"/>ded at the hauen now called <hi style="font-style: italic;">Totnes</hi>, the yeare of the <lb/> world, <date when-custom="2850" calendar="mol:annoMundi" datingMethod="mol:annoMundi">2850</date>.

We could supply @datingPoint on this date, pointing it to a proleptic Julian date defined somewhere (presumably in the annoMundi <calendar> element).

In my searches, though, I did find a dump from SourceForge of some Council tickets dating back many years, which seemed to be addressing this, and supplied the following examples:

<date when-generic="0027" datingPoint="#RamesesII" datingMethod="#Egyptian365">27 years into the reign of Rameses II, counting in the Egyptian 365-day calendar</date>

On the <date when-generic="5" datingPoint="#ArabianNights">5th night</date>, Scheherazade told another story...

<date when-generic="1590-02-20" datingMethod="#JulianOS">The 20th Feb 1590 (old style)</date> is <date when-generic="1591-02-20" datingMethod="#JulianNS">the 20th Feb 1591 (new style)</date> in the Julian Calendar, according to the English custom.

We aim to sight land on the <date when-generic="35" datingPoint="#sailedSierraLeone" datingMethod="#TravelItinerary">35th day</date>.

In the last example, the targets of @datingPoint and @datingMethod might be as follows:

<taxonomy xml:id="dating">
  <category xml:id="TravelItinerary">
    <gloss>@when-generic indicates the number of days as an integer.</gloss>
  </category>
</taxonomy>
...
<person xml:id="RevRichardMadox">
  <event xml:id="sailedSierraLeone" when-generic="193" datingPoint="#sailedSouthampton" datingMethod="#TravelItinerary"><label>sailed from Sierra Leone</label><p>This was 193 days after leaving Southampton.</p></event>
...
  <event xml:id="sailedSouthampton" when-iso="1582-01-01"><label>sailed from Southampton</label></event>
</person>

In addition to the above class att.datable.generic, it would be greatly advantageous if @calendar were available as part of att.datable.  Currently, it is only available for <date>, although there seems no reason why this should be the case.  It should be emphasized that it specifies the calendar system of the text within the given element rather than that of the attributes of the @when genus, to avoid confusion; however, in the absence of @datingPoint and @datingMethod it could, by convention, indicate the calendrical system used by @when-generic, e.g.
<date when="1499-12-23" when-generic="1500-01-01" calendar="Julian">1st Jan 1500</date>
<date when="1499-12-23" when-generic="905 Jumada i-Ula 11" calendar="Islamic">905 Jumada i-Ula 11</date>

These look simpler to me, so you might want to select from them. Interesting to see @when-generic; presumably it was a proposal that didn't survive, or a precursor to @when-custom.

martindholmes commented 1 year ago

@joeytakeda Is the example above reasonable, or shall we concoct another one?

joeytakeda commented 6 months ago

Returning to this old ticket, and I'm still a bit confused as to the utility of @datingPoint — at the moment, all of the examples above use integers to express the relative date, but they are unit-less. For instance, in the example that @martindholmes posted from SourceForge (updated to use @when-custom)

<date when-custom="0027" datingPoint="#RamesesII" datingMethod="#Egyptian365">27 years into the reign of Rameses II, counting in the Egyptian 365-day calendar</date>

However, given that a date is relative, I wonder if something like this would be an acceptable example:

<event xml:id="GettysburgAddress" when="1863-11-09">
   <eventName>The Gettysburg Address</eventName>
</event>
<!--...-->
<date datingPoint="#GettysburgAddress">Four score and seven years ago</date>

But I'm not clear on how we'd represent that this is 87 years in the past. E.g. would it be appropriate to use either @when-iso and/or @when-custom to represent this? 

<date when-iso="-P20Y" datingPoint="#GettysburgAddress">Four score and seven years ago</date>
<!--...or...-->
<date when-custom="-P20Y" datingPoint="#GettysburgAddress">Four score and seven years ago</date>

Another option (possibly) is Arthur Stringer's epistolary The Prairie Child (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28514/28514-h/28514-h.htm), which is written similarly to Sinclair Ross As For Me and My House insofar as the diary entries are simply given by month and day of week:

<div>
<head><date when="--03-08" xml:id="ch1_03-08">Friday the Eighth of March</date></head>
<!--...-->
<p>So after <date datingPoint="#ch1_03-08">three long years</date> and more of silence I'm turning back to this, the journal of one irresponsible old Chaddie McKail</p>
</div>

If we didn't want to do duration, I presume we could consider "CE" as a datingPoint as well:

<event xml:id="CE">
     <eventName>The Start of the Common Era</eventName>
</event>
<date when-custom="2024" datingPoint="#CE">2024 CE</date>
<!-- = when="2024" -->

Another option is the beginning of the Unix Epoch:

<event xml:id="UnixEpoch" when="1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z">
   <eventName>Unix Epoch</eventName>
   <ptr target="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time"/>
</event>

<p>The <att>datingPoint</att> attribute was added to the TEI Guidelines on <date when-custom="1322223374" datingPoint="#UnixEpoch">2011-11-25 12:16:14 +0000</date></p>
martindholmes commented 6 months ago

I think one utility of #datingPoint is when you know a relative date but you can't tie snything to a real date -- for example in a fictional chronicle.