Meeting on senses, defs and segs
Posted by mholmes on 23 Nov 2011 in Activity log
Met with SK and ECH to discuss a number of possible issues:
- Should we attempt to crystallize (in the markup) implicit links between prons and defs attested by the same informant on the same occasion? On balance, we feel not; it's insufficiently clear that such links represent anything meaningful above and beyond the fact that the same informant on the same occasion attested to a pronunciation and a definition, and there are instances of entries where it would be problematic to make explicit inferences along these lines.
- Does the current display of entries adequately reflect what a linguist would like to see? No, for a number of reasons, some good because they provide new functionality (such as embedded entries for constituent morphemes), and some bad because (for instance) the original bracketing of pron with def for a single informant event (in a Lexware "var" block) is no longer apparent. ECH will go away and imagine changes to the current display, as well as alternative renderings we might use.
- Should defs contain multiple seg+bibl blocks? Yes and no. Some such bracketings already usefully exist (such as in the entry for háypx̣), and I've just tweaked the display to make them render more cleanly; on the other hand, creating such collapsed defs is interpretive and takes time, and is not a priority right now. So the existing ones will be left, but SK will not create more.
- Who are the informants? ECH and SK will retrieve a list of them, and I'll create a personography from it. Then I'll build that information into the website, and make it possible to highlight only one informant's information in a given entry. We may also be able to display a custom dictionary based on the information from a single informant.