Why do our edition files credit the ERC in the Encoding Description?

[danbalogh]

Is there a reason why the statement "The project DHARMA has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 809994)." is placed in the <encodingDesc> section of the TEI header? Is this widespread practice in TEI editions? If so, fine by me, but it strikes me as strange. Indeed, the containing element is called <projectDesc>, which might imply that we want to credit the project's funder here. But according to the TEI Guidelines, <projectDesc> "describes in detail the aim or purpose for which an electronic file was encoded, together with any other relevant information concerning the process by which it was assembled or collected" - so this shouldn't really be about the funding but about purpose, and the parent of this element is the <encodingDesc>.

I think we should consider either deleting the <projectDesc> element from our template and existing files, or replacing its contents with something like "Texts collected and edited for Project DHARMA". The ERC, in turn, should rather be credited at the end of the title statement; I suggest that this should be at the very end, after all other responsibilities, e.g.:

<funder>European Research Council (ERC), grant agreement no 809994</funder>

I do not, of course, insist on this if you think the change is unnecessary, or if it requires too much effort. @michaelnmmeyer , what do you think would be best practice?

[danbalogh]

Also, I notice that in older versions of the template, the acknowledgement was in the publication statement:

<authority>DHARMA
<note>This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 809994).</note>
</authority>

[michaelnmmeyer]

I concur that using funder for acknowledging the ERC would be better.

In fact, the whole encodingDesc section is somewhat obsolete. Besides projectDesc, it currently contains schemaRef (which points to an older version of the EGD) and listPrefixDef (which does not describe what the system actually does). To avoid having to update it as we progress, I suggest we just delete it and put somewhere the URL of the project (now that we have one). People can find all the relevant material from there.

I would put the URL of the project under publicationStmt, but I do not see a TEI element or attribute that would fit (besides the generic <p>).

[danbalogh]

On the funder: in discussing roles and responsibilities on Zoom just today, we've also touched on the point of disassociating ERC funding to some extent, so that while we give credit to the ERC in our files, we also leave open the way for other future files encoded after the end of DHARMA but in line with our conventions needn't thank the ERC. I think <funder> does justice to that too: it would be clearly present in our XML files, but new files created with different funding will put in a different funder.

On the encoding description in general: It would certainly be nice to retain some reasonably future-proof way of pointing from our XML files to our encoding guide. The encoding description may contain paragraphs in any combination with rigorous elements, so perhaps something along these lines?

<encodingDesc>
<p>Encoded in TEI/EpiDoc according to the <ref target="{URI for DHARMA editorial conventions or page with link to Encoding Guides}>Conventions of Project DHARMA</ref></p>
</encodingDesc>

If we want a link to the project website in the publication statement, it seems to me that simply doing the following would be correct TEI:

<publicationStmt>
<authority><ref target="{URI for DHARMA website}>DHARMA</ref></authority>
{the rest of the publication statement>
</publicationStmt>