Topic: prosopographical records, ontologies, and links to external authoritiy files

The slides are based on those supplied by the various Digital Humanities Summer Schools at the University of Oxford under the Creative Commons Attribution license and have been adopted to the needs of the 2015 Introduction to TEI at DHSI.

Slides were produced using MultiMarkDown, Pandoc, Slidy JS, and the Snippet jQuery Syntax highlighter.

General notes

Names refer to (named) entities. Information describing entities in detail can be kept in ontologies in the <profileDesc> of the TEI header (c.f. our session on metadata). They are then linked to by means of @ref attributes on the names.

What can we say about named entities?

Potentially, quite a lot…

<person xml:id="VM1893">
    <persName xml:lang="ru">Владимир Владимирович Маяковский</persName>
    <persName xml:lang="fr">Wladimir Maïakowski</persName>
    <birth when="1893-07-19">7 July (OS) 1893, 
        <placeName ref="#BGDT" xml:lang="en">
            <settlement>Baghdati<settlement>, <country>Georgia<country>
        </placeName>
    </birth>
    <death when="1930-04-14"/>
    <occupation>Poet and playwright</occupation>
    <note>Among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.</note>
</person>

What elements should the TEI provide for such a purposes?

Traits, states, and events

As elsewhere in the TEI, we resolve this question by adding a layer of abstraction. We distinguish three classes of information:

• <state>: more general-purpose, but usually a time-related property (e.g. occupation for a person, population for a place)
• <trait>: if you want to a distinguish between time-bound and static, use this for properties that (usually) don’t change over time (e.g. eye colour for a person, location for a place)
• <event>: an independent event in the real world which may lead to a change in state or trait (e.g. birth for a person, a war for a place)

All these elements are members of the att.datable class and thus can have time/dating attributes.

States

Some typical states for a person

• <occupation>: an informal description of a person’s trade, profession or occupation
• <residence>: a person’s present or past places of residence
• <affiliation>: an informal description of a person’s present or past affiliation with some organization
• <education>: a description of the educational experience of a person
• <floruit> contains information about a person’s period of activity

Traits

Some typical traits of a person

• <faith>: faith, belief system, religion etc. of a person
• <langKnowledge>: linguistic knowledge of a person
• <nationality>: nationality (socio-politico status)
• <sex>: sex
• <socecStatus>: socio-economic status

Some typical traits of a place:

• <climate>: describes the climate
• <location>: describes where a place is (see later)
• <population>: describes its population
• <terrain>: describes its terrain

Some of these (e.g. sex) have normalised attributes, but mostly they contain free text descriptions.

Events

For persons, only two specific event elements are defined: <birth> and <death>. Anything else must be defined using the generic <event> element and its @type attribute.

<person xml:id="pers_3">
    <persName xml:lang="ar">
        <forename>نجيب</forename> <forename>يوسف</forename> <surname>عربيلي</surname></persName>
    <persName xml:lang="ar-Latn-EN">
        <forename>Najeeb</forename> <forename xml:lang="en">Joseph</forename> <surname>Arbeely</surname></persName>
    <birth>
        <date when="1861">1861</date>, in <placeName>Damascus</placeName>
    </birth>
    <death>
        <date when="1904">1904, February</date>, in <placeName>New York</placeName>
    </death>
    <event when="1878">
        <p>Migration to the <placeName>USA</placeName></p>
    </event>
    <state from="1885">
        <p>American consul in <placeName>Jerusalem</placeName></p>
    </state>
    <state notBefore="1886">
        <p>Inspector in the <orgName>Bureau of Immigration</orgName> at the port of <placeName>New York</placeName></p>
    </state>
    <state from="1892-04-15" xml:lang="en">
        <p>Editor of <orgName>Kawkab America</orgName>.</p>
    </state>
</person>

A place as being defined by its location

The <location> element can contain

• a more or less well-structured description using the hierarchy of place name components mentioned earlier (a politico-geographical location)
• a set of geographical co-ordinates

Example:

<place type="neighbourhood" xml:id="ltg000001">
    <placeName xml:lang="ar-Latn-x-ijmes">Bāb al-Jābiyya</placeName>
    <placeName xml:lang="ar">باب الجابية</placeName>
    <settlement xml:lang="ar" type="city">دمشق الشام</settlement>
    <region xml:lang="ota" type="province" notAfter="1918-10-01">ولاية سورية</region>
    <location>
        <geo>33.507628, 36.301395</geo>
    </location>
</place>

Places can self-nest

<place type="state">
    <placeName xml:lang="en">Ottoman Empire</placeName>
    <placeName xml:lang="ar">الدولة العثمانية العالية</placeName>
    <place type="province">
        <placeName notAfter="1918-10-01" xml:lang="ota ar">ولاية سورية</placeName>
        <placeName notAfter="1918-10-01" xml:lang="en">Province of Syria</placeName>
        <place type="city">
            <placeName type="city" xml:lang="ar">دمشق الشام</placeName>
            <placeName type="city" xml:lang="en">Damascus</placeName>
            <place type="neighbourhood">
                <placeName xml:lang="ar-Latn-x-ijmes">Bāb al-Jābiyya</placeName>
                <placeName xml:lang="ar">باب الجابية</placeName>
                <location>
                    <geo>33.507628, 36.301395</geo>
                </location>
            </place>
        </place>
    </place>
</place>

Organizational names

Organizations have names as well. These are any named collection of people regarded as a single unit. An <orgName> can point back to an <org> in the header.

<p>it is debated <date notAfter="1908-10-01">now</date> among ‘<orgName ref="#CUP">Young Turkey</orgName>’ adherents whether it would be right to punish the officials who were led to bribery by the littleness of their pay &amp; its frequent irregularity.</p>

<org xml:id="CUP">
    <!-- Information about the organization -->
    <orgName xml:lang="en">Committee of Union and Progress</orgName>
</org>

All entities can be fictional

<place type="imaginary">
    <placeName>Atlantis</placeName>
    <location>
        <offset>fifty leagues beyond</offset>
        <placeName>Pillars of 
            <persName>Hercules</persName></placeName>
    </location>
</place>

Personal relationships

• The <relation> (relationship) element describes any kind of relationship or linkage amongst other entities. We distinguish
  • ‘mutual’ relationships (e.g. sibling) from
  • non-mutual or directed relationships (e.g. parent-of ).
• The following attributes are available:
  • @name: supplies a name for the kind of relationship of which this is an instance
  • @active: identifies the ‘active’ participants in a non-mutual relationship, or all the participants in a mutual one
  • @mutual: supplies a list of participants amongst all of whom the relationship holds equally
  • @passive: identifies the ‘passive’ participants in a non-mutual relationship

Example

<person xml:id="pers_2">
    <persName xml:lang="en"><addName type="title">Dr.</addName> <forename>Abraham</forename> <surname>Arbeely</surname></persName>
    <!-- ... -->
</person>
<person xml:id="pers_3">
    <persName xml:lang="en"><addName type="title">Prof.</addName> <forename>Abraham</forename> <forename>Joseph</forename> <surname>Arbeely</surname></persName>
<!-- ... -->
</person>
<person xml:id="pers_4">
    <persName xml:lang="en"><forename>Najeeb</forename> <forename>Joseph</forename> <surname>Arbeely</surname></persName>
<!-- ... -->
</person>
<!--....-->
<relationGrp type="children">
    <relation name="parent" active="#pers_4" passive="#pers_2 #pers_3"/>
</relationGrp>
<relationGrp type="siblings">
    <realtion name="sibling" mutual="#pers_2 #pers_3"/>
</relationGrp>

Nyms

The elements <listNym> and <nym> are used to document the canonical form of a name or name-component.

• <nym>
  • Like a dictionary entry, it can contain model.entryParts (e.g. <form>, <orth>, <etym>) and may also include a number of other <nym>s
  • in addition to global attributes and att.typed, it includes the attribute @parts to point to constituent <nym>s
• <listNym> a list of canonical names
• @nymRef has been added to the attribute class att.naming to refer to the canonical name

Example

<nym xml:id="nym-F-737">
    <form xml:lang="ar">شكري</form>
    <form xml:lang="ar-Latn-EN">Shukri</form>
    <form xml:lang="ar-Latn-x-ijmes">Shukrī</form>
    <form xml:lang="tr">Şükrü</form>
</nym>
<nym xml:id="nym-F-406">
    <form xml:lang="ar">يوسف</form>
    <form xml:lang="ar-Latn-EN">Yusef</form>
    <form xml:lang="ar-Latn-FR">Youssouf</form>
    <form xml:lang="ar-Latn-x-ijmes">Yūsuf</form>
    <form xml:lang="de">Josef</form>
    <form xml:lang="en">Joseph</form>
    <form xml:lang="tr">Yusuf</form>
</nym>

Next

Now let’s do an exercise where we make an existing <teiHeader> element better by supplying stand-of markup for entities linked to <persName> and <placeName> elements in the text.