The Corpus Thread - Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab

3.2. Header structure 40
3.2.3.5 The participant description
The participant description () element is used to provide
additional information about authors (or speakers) of texts. The element
itself is considered obligatory in the CTB header, however, its contents may
just be an empty element which is given as a placeholder to ensure
that the header has a valid TEI structure. If additional personal info is
given, one element for each participant having been involved in
creating the text is inserted into. 23 The element
carries a number of attributes which are used to provide encoded values for
some key aspects of the person concerned, see the following example: 24
The DDOC material mentioned in Section 3.1 has a lot more information
on each text creator, e.g. his place of birth which could be expressed as an
element under, his place of residence which could
be put into an element as sibling to , and so on.
However, corpus-linguistic practice has shown that this type of information
hardly ever is used (nor useful if it is not given according to clear-cut
classification schemes). Therefore, new material should not be marked-up
with this kind of information that is also extremely costly to gather. For
DDOC (and other material) which already carries this type of information,
appropriate structural elements of should be included into the
header to allow keeping this information for possible future investigation,
see Chapter ??.
3.2.4 The revision description
A list of typical revisions which a document will undergo should be created,
i.e. values for revisionType. At least the revision type “Document created”
seems important. Others, which deal with the completeness of the header
may be useful as well. The pattern of the revision description is as follows:
23 A possible empty placeholder element may then be deleted.
24 More details of which values to fill in can be found in Section 3.3.