Re: recording time period covered by a document

Dear all,

I can think of a number of cases where an element like this might be useful.

For example many (usually more or less periodic) types of list-like 
publications (military list, lists of state personnell or of the 
nobility – like Burke's Peerage or the annuaires in numerous territories 
– almanacs, encyclopdiae etc.) have a certain coverage, usually one or 
more years, special regions, special groups of people/places etc.

As these texts might contain several kinds of these lists (e.g., 
nobility and state personnell while the military is covered in a 
separate volume), my idea would be to have one or more

profileDesc/coverageDesc/coverage

which may contain

- <p> for prose descriptions
- <date> for the temporal coverage
- <place> for the geographical coverage
- <name> for groups of people
- <coverage> for grouping the data along the lines of the document
- @corresp to link it to the relevant part(s) of the text

(Actually, I don't really like 'name', but an element that might contain 
the name of a family, a group of people etc. should not be too specific 
nor should the content of this element be too complex)

It might look sth. like this

<coverage>
     <date when="1780" />
     <coverage corresp="#l1">
         <place>Mecklenburg-Schwerin</place>
     </coverage>
     <coverage corresp="#l2">
         <place>Mecklenburg-Strelitz</place>
         <name>Nobility</name>
     </coverage>
</coverage>

which tells us that the text covers the year 1780 and section #l1 is 
about Mecklenburg-Schwerin in general while #l2 covers 
Mecklenburg-Strelitz and here specifically the nobility.

It might, though, be easier to just repeat the information and forbid 
nesting the coverage element.

In short, I'd strongly support such a feature request.

All best,

Dario


On 18.10.2016 17:53, Martin Holmes wrote:
> Whenever I have to deal with Dublin Core's <coverage> element:
>
> http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#elements-coverage
>
> I feel the need of something like this in TEI. I wonder if there's a 
> good case for a feature request for a new element:
>
> profileDesc/coverageDesc
>
> which would contain date info, geographical info, and perhaps other 
> stuff.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 2016-10-18 02:22 AM, Magdalena Turska wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I was charged with a task of migrating custom metadata schema into TEI.
>> One of the challenges is representing the period covered in the
>> document, which in the bespoke encoding was represented as
>>
>> |<coverage-start>1945</coverage-start>|
>>
>> |<coverage-end>1946</coverage-end>|
>>
>> It took me quite a while to hunt for the TEI way of expressing similar
>> concept. Following the trail of <creation> element, which I used to
>> represent the date of creation of the original document, I concentrated
>> my search within <profileDesc> and came up
>> with profileDesc/settingDesc/setting/date
>>
>> |<setting> <date from="1945" to="1946"/> </setting>|
>>
>>  I wonder if there's any established practice to encode such a general
>> information about text content? Reaching into language corpora to
>> achieve that seems rather awkward, especially since phrasing of
>> settingDesc element (the setting or settings within which a language
>> interaction takes place, or other places otherwise referred to in a
>> text, edition, or metadata) seems to concentrate very strongly on
>> 'geographical' or locational aspect of the setting. Nevertheless,
>> Guidelines examples of settingDesc tend to record both location and
>> temporal aspect there. I'd appreciate any comments and solutions adopted
>> by projects.
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Magdalena
>>
>>

-- 
Dario Kampkaspar
Editionsprojekt Karlstadt – Editionsprojekt Rist – DARIAH-DE

Herzog August Bibliothek
Lessingplatz 1
D-38304 Wolfenbüttel

Phone: +49 - 53 31 - 808-321