#552 clarify how to encode author of subset or part of document

[Kevin Hawkins]

The note on the spec for docAuthor says, "The document author's name often occurs within a byline, but the docAuthor element may be used whether the byline element is used or not. It should be used only for the author(s) of the entire document, not for author(s) of any subset or part of it." I think we should add a sentence to explain that you use <byline> for author(s) of any subset or part of it. That seems to be what's said at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/DS.html#DSHD .

[Kevin Hawkins]

We should also add a cross-reference from http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-byline.html to http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/DS.html#DSHD in addition to 4.2.2 and 4.5, as already given.

[Kevin Hawkins]

But back to the note in the spec for docAuthor: do we really mean not to allow people to use docAuthor for a subset or part of the document? It's a member of model.divWrapper, so why would it be a member of that if we didn't intend for it to be used that way?

[Martin Holmes]

If you're encoding a primary source document, you're presumably going to do something more rigorous than using <docAuthor> or <byline> to record what you believe to be the truth about who wrote what -- something with @resps pointing to <respStmt>s would be the right approach, I think. <docAuthor> and <byline> are intended to identify the apparent function of pieces of text occurring in the document. What occurs in <docAuthor> on a title page may be an outright lie or a satirical joke.

But it would help to have a concrete example to discuss here -- how did this question arise?

[Kevin Hawkins]

Wanted to know how to encode authors of chapters or sections of a book.

[Martin Holmes]

How do they appear in the source text? If they appear in such a way that you can encode them in a byline, you could use @resp on docAuthor to point to a respStmt that defines the exact role and points to the portions of the document to which it applies. But I think using docAuthor just says "the source text appears to claim that this string refers to or identifies the author of [parts of] the document."

[Kevin Hawkins]

But as in the text on the ticket (before I started adding afterthoughts as comments), I noted that there's a note on the element spec for docAuthor which says not to use it for parts of documents.

[Syd Bauman]

Council sub-group thinks we should, per KH suggestion, add a sentence explaining to use <byline> w/o <docAuthor> when encoding an instance of the name of the author of a part or section of the document.

(We also think <docAuthor> goes in all sorts of places it shouldn't, but that's another story.)

[Syd Bauman]

Added prose to <remarks> in tagdoc of <docAuthor> in revision 13284.