[MEI-L] mdiv and sources

[Roland, Perry (pdr4h)]

All,

I agree with Raffaele that the source meta-data should be in the header.  The note that Johannes referred to about putting sourcedesc within mdiv was a bad, bad idea. :)

MEI doesn't deal very well with Johannes' main question about how to deal with top-level structural differences between multiple sources.  But, on the other hand, TEI doesn't do this well either.

Possible solutions:

1) Encode the two versions of the same opera as different MEI instances.  This gives you complete control over the structuring of the mdivs; that is, you don't have to worry from the outset about the relationships between the two versions -- you're pushing them off 'til later.  Methods for dealing with them later include using annot, extref, and extptr or even using something like METS to encode the structural relationships.

2) Use an <meicorpus> or <group> element (depending on whether you want a header for each version) to wrap both versions into a single MEI file.  You still have to encode both in their entirety at this time because there's no "copyOf" feature that would allow re-use of a chunk of markup in multiple locations.  However, now that the 2 versions are in the same file, you can mark correspondences between them with @corresp.  We can talk about creating a copyOf feature later.

3) Use the data attribute on source.  This attribute can be used to point to the mdivs that make up the source.  This list of ids here, as Johannes suggests, can be interepreted to be explicit; that is,  if an mdiv's id is here it's a part of this source, if not, then it ain't.  This doesn't help with recording the structure of the component mdivs, only the sequence.  BTW, if someone can suggest a better name than 'data' for this attribute, I'd be grateful.

These are the things that come to mind right away.  Other possible solutions welcomed.

--
perry

__________________________
Perry Roland
Scholarly Resources
University of Virginia Library
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pdr4h at virginia.edu<mailto:pdr4h at virginia.edu>

________________________________
From: mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de [mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de] On Behalf Of Raffaele Viglianti [raffaeleviglianti at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 10:40 AM
To: Music Encoding Initiative
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] mdiv and sources

Hello Johannes,

I've never came across a problem like this, but I would think that there could be projects that deal with theatrical texts that might have come out with a solution for this in TEI.
I personally think that all the source metadata should be in the header, so I like your last idea better.

This chapter of the TEI guidelines about linking and segmentation could be useful (if you haven't already looked at it).
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SA.html

I am thinking that an element like linkGrp (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-linkGrp.html) might be helpful to structure the divs in different orders according to the source, and the presence or the absence of a link/@target determines wether a certan (m)div was present or not in that source.

Best,
Raffaele

2009/3/18 Johannes Kepper <kepper at edirom.de<mailto:kepper at edirom.de>>
Hi all,

I discovered a problem with mdiv and different sources, which we need
to clarify rather soon. When thinking about an opera transmitted in
several sources, it is not unlikely that the sources have different
structures, i.e. a missing scene in one source, a different order of
scenes etc. Differing movement titles are a quite similar problem.

For movements, turns, acts, scenes etc. MEI uses the mdiv element,
which is direct child of body and may be nested recursively. At this
point of the tree, there is no app element allowed, which would allow
to define multiple divs and refer to the corresponding sources.

One possibility would be to hand over this functionality to the
section element, which can occur directly within the music. By using
the @type, one could say that the section is really a kind of music
division. This would cannibalize mdiv, and would also be a kind of
misuse of section in its current form.

Perry mentions an alternative in his description of mdiv: "Another
possible model is <!ELEMENT mdiv (score?, parts?, sourcedesc*)>
which allows meta-data to accompany an mdiv." This solution seems not
to be too thought out yet, but seems to be more promising in my eyes.
Could you share some more thoughts on this?

Another idea would be to have information about the structure of a
source (which means the sequence and nesting of mdivs) in its
sourceDesc in the header. From there we could point down into the
music partof the file. If a sourceDesc does not point to a given mdiv,
this movement is not part of the source (of course we could also link
back to the description in the header). This idea is apparently also
not too well thought out yet, but it might be an alternative.

What do you think – how should we deal with different movement names
and structures in multiple sources?

best,
Johannes
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