Authors of additions

[andrew-morrison]

Something the MMM project have brought up are people with entries in the persons authority file, and who have a role of "author" somewhere in the manuscript descriptions, but not in the context of an msItem.

For example, Ioannis Morezenos, person_106872042, is mentioned in MS_Holkham_Gr_42.xml, inside the additions section, because of the "Hymns and verses on the Ascension" that he "composed and autographed" on "fols 347v". Could/should an entry in the works authority file be created for those hymns and verses? Is this a rarity, or something that you're looking to add more of? How would multiple authors of multiple additions to a single manuscript (or part) be marked up?

@DILewis might be able to expand upon why this is an issue for MMM.

[DILewis]

To explain, from the context of MMM, the situation @andrew-morrison describes (Morezenos in MS. Holkham Gr. 42) was being mapped to RDF that asserted Morezenos as author and scribe of the manuscript itself. That's especially misleading, since none of the text he was actually responsible for is in the final RDF graph anyway. Also, the risk of associating a later owner as a scribe or author of the manuscript is that any automated date-based reasoning could get confused.

There are (at least) 3 less wrong options for MMM aim for. The first two don't touch the TEI, and only affect the mapping, the third affects both:

1. Drop Morezenos from the mapping, since there's no single expression to attach him to (accurate, but unsatisfactory)
2. Make the tag map into an expression without a work (or make up a work reference in the mapping process) and then assign Morezenos as author and scribe of that. Problems with this include that multiple additions, pen tests, etc. couldn't be separated, and that it becomes hard to refer back from the linked data to the TEI.
3. Enrich the TEI in some way to make the existence of texts clearer. Options might include: moving the MS additions into the main contents (not very satisfactory); specify a distinct work ID for the additions; or maybe using <locus> or <q> or something within the additions to give us separable contents that could have works or at least ids associated with them.

Edited so tags are displayed

[holfordm]

This is particularly difficult since the content of the addition is post medieval; if it were a medieval addition I would treat it as a msItem. The additions element doesn't allow much flexibility or detail for encoding its contents, and so in general I think it is good practice to catalogue added contents alongside main contents, although it is not then possible to distinguish original/added contents in a machine readable way. additions does allow p and list, item etc., which are already used in the description - if those could be given IDs, would that solve the problem?
Should the rule for cataloguers be "each subsection of additions should have an xml:id, just as each msItem should have an xml:id" ?
The other easy fix would be to create an authority file for this work, as @andrew-morrison suggested, if that would in fact fix this problem?
@andrew-morrison what are some other examples of this author-without-a-work problem, and are they causing similar problems?

[andrew-morrison]

There are 20 other instances of persons flagged as authors but not in works or bibliographic references. You can find them in Oxygen with Find/Replace in Files by searching for .+ with Regular expression selected and Restrict to XPath of //persName[contains(@role, 'author') and not(ancestor::msItem or ancestor::bibl)].

In total:

• 7 are in additions
• 7 are in head
• 5 are in accMat (accompanying material)
• 1 is in musicNotation
• 1 is in summary

For MMM, all except Morezenos in MS. Holkham Gr. 42 are skipped when the TEI is simplified down into an XML form that can be mapped to the ontologies chosen for expressing the descriptions as linked data. The relationship between authors and works are taken from the authority files instead. He has only been included because he has two roles: author and scribe. Maybe they shouldn't be excluded, especially as additions and accompanying material could be significant to the migrations of the manuscripts which are being mapped. But the numbers above are small.

[DILewis]

These are interesting, @andrew-morrison. I think that, for now at least, exclusion is probably the safest option.

• From a quick look, I think the entries in <additions> are similar to the one we're discussing, except do involve different texts by different authors, so illustrate the need to distinguish them somehow.
• <accMat> is also tricky, since it clearly contain known, often medieval, works, so it'd be nice to be able to use this information. That said, attaching any of that to the parent MS risks confusing dates and contexts.
• At least some of the head cases (sorry) show when the MS is a single-author collection (e.g. Cicero, Opera philosophica). I can see a question about whether the collection is itself a work, but it seems to me that there's less harm in omitting that information for now. I also don't know whether Formularies from the school of <persName>William Kingsmill</persName> (MS Lat. misc. e 103) would really be an author for the MS.
• musicNotation looks like a work/expression in this case (MS Laud. Lat. 22), but I can see why it mightn't be considered an msItem (for a start, it's in the middle of a text)
• summary looks to me a bit like head (i.e. it's information about the whole MS). In this one case (MS Lat. misc. c.66), it's the only place where the scribe is identified.