#96 Discuss issue of how inclusive EpiDoc should be

[BODARD Gabriel]

There are people using EpiDoc to mark-up, e.g., Mediaeval manuscript and codex editions, and Lachmannian editions of ancient texts. We need to decide whether (a) EpiDoc should really cater for these rather different kinds of text, both in the Schema and the Guidelines, or (b) EpiDoc should remain focussed on documentary/primary source texts, i.e. texts for which a diplomatic edition would be meaningful, and expect people from a wider tent who find the Schema and Guidelines useful to their purposes to build on and modify them (as we do the TEI) for their particular needs.

[Elli Mylonas]

Summary of brief discussion from today's call

A number of projects and organizations are using epidoc, even though they are not strictly epigraphic or papyrological projects. Epidoc is useful in these cases because of its documentation, which can be used to guide encoding practice and also because of the ready made schema and accompanying xsl and css files.

One area where it makes a lot of sense to be able to use the work that has gone into Epidoc is to handle actual edition text. Epidoc metadata (teiHeader and msDesc info), on the other hand, is less generalizable.

The popularity of Epidoc and the differing requirements of these projects lead to requests to enhance and generalize the Epidoc Schema in order to accommodate them.

This adds a lot of extra work and dilutes the focus of Epidoc on more strictly epigraphic/papyrological material. Epidoc is also a strict subset of full TEI anyway.

Some suggestions:
Add something about scope in the Guidelines
Configure Epidoc ODD so that it can be easily used piecemeal, and incorporated in to other, more general schemas. Most importantly, make sure the the text+apparatus component is easily re-usable.

[Andrew Dunning]

I have tended to use EpiDoc as a sane version of TEI for premodern documents; having someone to make a rational decision on basic things – such as whether to use <choice><abbr></abbr><expan></expan></choice> or <expan>, or what method of <div> nesting should be used – is highly useful. Many of these sorts of things should arguably never have been options in TEI in the first place, and I would be in favour (as someone using EpiDoc for medieval manuscripts) of working with TEI to come up with a more general subset of guidelines for dealing with premodern documents, and potentially narrowing the focus back down to a specific customization for epigraphy, if this results in a better user experience and/or is easier to maintain.

[BODARD Gabriel]

It was agreed in a phone call last month that Hugh will set up a discussing with DLL, Andrew Dunning, and Perseus for people wanting to use EpiDoc features but expand into non-epigraphic areas (such as genetic elements, for example). That conversation is ongoing, and will presently be reported here and/or on Markup.

[Hugh A. Cayless]

ODD Chaining (see [#119]) will enable the creation of ODDs that derive from EpiDoc, but add in features in TEI.