Sebastian Rahtz a écrit :
> Your examples are all good, Gabriel, and I would probably
> concur that some feature is missing. But I do inevitably come
> back to asking what the purpose of your encoding is. If the
> normalized date is so hedged around with fear and uncertainty,
> does it need treating in the formal way which @when, @notBefore
> and @notAfter propose?

Well, we may still want to: sort texts by date; identify all texts that 
are likely to be/at all possible to be second century in date; search 
for all texts that could fall in the range 145-155. (These are not for 
the sake of argument, these are all things we use the TEI markup to 
generate for the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias.)

>> "17th July (definitely and precisely). Don't know which year, but 
>> almost certainly mid-sixteenth century."?
>>
> <date>17th July<note type="editorial">Don't know which year, but almost 
> certainly mid-sixteenth century.</note></date>

Right, I think what you're saying is that we could treat these two 
dating statements as separate elements:

<date evidence="internal" notBefore="-07-17" notAfter="-07017">July 
17th</date>, almost certainly <date evidence="palaeographic" 
notBefore="1525" notAfter="1575">mid-sixteenth century</date>.

With the addition of @exact="none" vel sim. I'd be happy enough that 
this allows us to do all the kinds of processing on date that we need 
to. (There may be clever ways to do this. And it may be that this is in 
fact only adequate for my purposes because exact dates to the day are 
relatively rare in my texts. They aren't for everyone.)

G


-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Epigrapher & Digital Classicist)

Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/