Mapping Materiality: Formalising structural representation for the <objectContents> element

In 2019, after having created elements like <object> and <objectIdentifier>, I added a provisional note to the TEI Guidelines chapter on Names, Dates, People, and Places to signal ongoing generalisation of the manuscript-centric elements in the context of the <object> element:

“Please note: The object element is a recent addition to TEI P5 Guidelines as of version 3.5.0 and as such might be more prone to further revision in the next few releases as its use develops. This may be particularly evident where its contents have been borrowed from msDesc and have yet to be generalized from their use in the context of manuscript descriptions.”(https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.11.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ND.html#NDOBJ)

While some elements later had additional tweaks that mostly involved changing their description slightly to allow for their use in describing objects rather than manuscripts and early-printed books, by and large no further modifications were made.

One remaining target for modification inside the <object> element was its wholesale inclusion of the <msContents> element. This element gives encoders a way to describe “the intellectual content of a manuscript, manuscript part, or other object either as a series of paragraphs or as a series of structured manuscript items”.(https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.11.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-msContents.html) As mentioned, the ‘or other object’ part of this and other element descriptions was added in the process of creating the <object> element and integrating it with the existing TEI framework. Nevertheless, there was a desire to duplicate the functionality of the <msContents> and modify it for the more general case of describing objects.

This short paper will discuss the creation of a more generalised <objectContents> element and whether the corresponding sub-structures of <msItem> and <msItemStruct> truly need to also be replaced in an object-agnostic form of description.