June 16, 2015

Updates to Trello

We have a new “Projects Tracking” board at: https://trello.com/b/J7jh75SD/projects-tracking with lists for projects that are on deck, in progress, and completed. The “Projects” list that was in “Text Tracking” has been moved to this board, so please check there if you have updates on a project or want to start a new one.

I’ve also added a “High-priority for publication” label to the “Text Tracking” board and marked the texts we’re hoping to focus on next. So, if you’re looking for something to work on, try to start with one of the high priority texts. We have a *lot* more in the first round of proofing and corrections than we have in the second round, so if we want to keep up the momentum with publishing, we’ll need to make sure to work on first proofing in particular.

Stage Directions

We talked about the examples of stage directions Sarah Stanley found in her review of the "UNKNOWN" @types. There were several that weren't covered by our current values and we considered whether we should add these to the schema. Since we had a smaller group, and since we also uncovered an inconsistency in our encoding of @type values for <stage> we made notes on our suggestions and will raise these with the next full-group meeting. We're considering adding the following values:

• "present" for stage directions that simply state the names of characters in a scene, without indicating that they entered, exited, or remained
• "remains" for cases where it's indicated that some character(s) remain on stage (further details in Sarah's notes from last week)
• "prop" for cases where props are simply noted, such as "Shield of Minerva"

We also realized that there is some inconsistency in our encoding where entrances and exits are combined with information we might usually give the @type "modifier" or "business"—such as the example in our internal documentation: "enter, waving scimitar." We used XPath (!) to confirm that these are sometimes encoded with "enter" or "exit" but are sometimes encoded with "mixed." We'll want to clarify our documentation to explain how to handle cases like this; we might also want to revisit our encoding—at the end of the meeting, we talked about whether it might make sense to use both @type and @subtype on <stage>, to preserve more information about the kinds of stage directions that are being mixed.

Hopefully, the next time we meet we'll be able to make some decisions about stage directions and implement them. In the mean time, if you find any more examples we should be talking about, please save them and bring to the meeting.