P5: TEIガイドライン

13.3.1 Basic PrinciplesTEI: Basic Principles¶

‘Characteristics’ or ‘traits’ are typically independent of an individual's volition or action and can be either physical, such as sex or hair and eye colour, or cultural, such as ethnicity, caste, or faith. The distinction is not entirely straightforward, however: while sex is fairly obviously a physical trait, gender should rather be regarded as culturally determined, and the division of mankind into different ‘races’, proposed by early (white European) anthropologists on the basis of physical characteristics such as skin colour, hair type and skull measurements, is by many modern cultural anthropologists now considered to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Furthermore, while some characteristics will obviously change over time, hair colour for example, none, in principle — not even sex — is immutable.

‘States’ include, for example, marital status, place of residence and position or occupation. Such states have a definite duration, that is, they have a beginning and an end and are typically a consequence of the individual's own action or that of others.

By ‘changes in state’ are meant the events in a person's life such as birth, marriage, or appointment to office; such events will normally be associated with a specific date or a fairly narrow date-range. Changes in states can also cause or be caused by changes in characteristics. Any statement or assertion on any of these aspects of a person's life will be based on some source, possibly multiple sources, possibly contradictory. Taking all this into account it follows that each such statement or assertion needs to be able to be documented, put into a time frame and be relatable to other statements or assertions of the same or any of the other types.

13.3.2 The Person ElementTEI: The Person Element¶

Information about a person, as distinct from references to a person, for example by name, is grouped together within a person element. Information about a group of people regarded as a single entity (for example ‘the audience’ of a performance) may be encoded using the personGrp element. Note however that information about a group of people with a distinct identity (for example a named theatrical troupe) should be recorded using the org element described in section 13.3.3 Organizational Data below.

One or more listPerson elements may be supplied within the particDesc (participant description) element in the profileDesc element of a TEI Header (see 2.4 The Profile Description). Like other forms of list, however, the listPerson can also appear within the body of a text when the module defined by this chapter is included in a schema.

The person element may contain many sub-elements, each specifying a different property of the person being described. The remainder of this section describes these more specific elements. For convenience, these elements are grouped into three classes, corresponding with the tripartite division outlined above: one for traits, one for states and one for events. Each class contains both specific elements for common types of biographical information, and a generic element for other, user-defined, types of information.

13.3.4 PlacesTEI: Places¶

In 13.2.3 Place Names we discuss various ways of naming places such as towns, countries, etc. In much the same way as these Guidelines distinguish between the encoding of names for people and the encoding of other data about people, so they also distinguish between the encoding of names for places and the encoding of other data about places. In this section we present elements which may be used to record in a structured way data about places of any kind which might be named or referenced within a text. Such data may be useful as a way of normalising or standardizing references to particular places, as the raw material for a gazetteer or similar reference document associated with a particular text or set of texts, or in conjunction with any form of geographical information system.

The model.placeStateLike class contains elements describing characteristics of a place which have a definite duration, such as its name. Any member of the model.placeNamePart may be used for this purpose, since a place element will usually contain at least one, and possibly several, placeName-like elements indicating the names associated with it, by different people, in different languages, or at different times.

For example, the modern city of Lyon in France was in Roman times known as Lugdunum. Although the modern and the Roman city are not physically co-extensive, they have significant areas which overlap, and we may therefore wish to regard them as the same place, while supplying both names with an indication of the time period during which each was current.

A place is defined, however, by its physical location, which does not typically change over time; we regard the location therefore as a trait of the place, and represent it by means of elements from the model.placeTraitLike class. Locations may be specified in a number of ways: as a set of coordinates defining a point or an area on the surface of the earth, or by providing a description of how the place may be found, usually in terms of other place names. For example, we can identify the location of the Canadian city of London, either by specifying its latitute and longitude, or by specifying that we mean the city called London located in the province called Ontario within the country called Canada.

In addition we may wish to supply a brief characterization of the place identified, for example to state that it is a city, an administrative area such as a country, or a landmark of some kind such as a monument or a battlefield. If our typology of places is simple, the open ended type attribute is the easiest way to represent it: so we might say <place type="city">, <place type="battlefield"> etc.

13.3.6 Dates and TimesTEI: Dates and Times¶