Do XML documents confuse FRBR?
I’ve been browsing around librarian blogs and seeing what mentions of FRBR they’ve made, and this entry in Dorothea Salo’s blog Caveat Lector pointed me to an interesting paper from the 2003 Extreme Markup Languages conference: An XML Document Corresponds to Which FRBR Group 1 Entity? by Allen Renear, Christopher Phillippe, Pat Lawton, and David Dubin, all of whom are from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign except for the last, who is just from the University of Illinois alone. A PDF of the paper is also available.
XML documents as defined in the W3C XML 1.0 specification, are now an important part of this bibliographic universe and it is natural to ask to which of FRBR’s “Group 1” entities does the XML document correspond. Curiously, there seem to be conflicting arguments for assigning the XML document to either of the two plausible entity categories: manifestation and expression. We believe these difficulties illuminate both the nature of the FRBR entities, and the nature of markup. We explore a conjecture that an XML document has a double aspect and that whether it is a FRBR manifestation or a FRBR expression depends upon context and intention. Such a double-aspected nature would not only be consistent with previous arguments that the meaning of XML markup varies in “illocutionary force” according to context of use, but might also help resolve an old puzzle in the humanities computing community as to whether markup is “part of” the text.
I don’t know what people think about this idea now, but feel free to leave a comment with an update. It’s an interesting question.