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Fonts, Handwriting Types, and Notations

RareMat, 2017.11.03

Overview

In rare material cataloging the capture of information about writing systems, font, and handwriting types is critical for describing important traits of resources in library and archive collections. BIBFRAME (BF) provides a foundation for rare material descriptive needs in these areas; the following recommendations for changes and extensions to BIBFRAME are meant to better provision for rare material cataloging.

Summary of recommendations

Relevant BF terms

Classes

bf:Notation

bf:MovementNotation

bf:MusicNotation

bf:Script

bf:TactileNotation

bf:FontSize

Predicates

bf:fontSize

bf:notation

Discussion

Fonts

BF is right to separate font from the other types of “notation,” since font refers to the style in which symbols are printed rather than to the symbol systems themselves. However, typeface is semantically related more to font size than to these symbol systems. Further, it is hard to understand why BF models only font size and not the other properties of a font - typeface and style.

Conventional definitions from the publishing world:

Handwriting Types

bf:Script is about the symbol system, but there is no way in BF to note a type of writing hand for handwritten manuscripts and other textual materials, e.g. English secretary hand, or Carolingian script.

http://rbms.info/files/dcrm/dcrmmss/DCRMMSS.pdf Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Manuscripts) instructs to capture information about the handwriting type if considered important for describing the resource. Using the term Script, this information is described as, “A type of writing hand; not the same as a writing system or a handwriting style (such as cursive or block letters). Gothic, Secretary, Carolingian minuscule, and Sütterlin are examples of scripts. See also Writing system.”

Proposal

Font

Following the usage described above, we propose a Font class to describe all font properties of a resource (or part of a resource), including typeface (e.g., Courier, Arial), size, and style (e.g., bold, italics). We propose a class Typeface with named individuals from a typeface vocabulary, and a class FontStyle with named individuals from a controlled font style vocabulary. We propose using the Measurement model to describe size as detailed below.

We propose predicate :writtenIn to relate a bibliographic resource (most likely Instance or Item) to a Font, and predicates hasTypeface, hasStyle to relate a Font instance to its Typeface and FontStyle. Predicates from the Measurement model would be used to model font size.

Diagram

Note that different multiple sample namespaces are shown; some may end up being the same. Font Diagram

RDF Sample

:it a :bf:Item ;
  :writtenIn :fnt .

:fnt a ex:Font ;
  :hasTypeface :courier ;
  :hasStyle :bold , :italics ,
  :hasMeasurement :meas .

:meas a ex:Measurement ;
  rdfs:label “11 point” ;
  ex:hasUnit :point ;
  rdf:value “11” .


#### Named individuals defined in the ontology or other controlled vocabulary

:courier a owl:NamedIndividual, ex:Typeface .
:bold a owl:NamedIndividual, ex:Style .
:italics a owl:NamedIndividual, ex:Style .

Handwriting Type

Because BF seems to currently conceive of instances of bf:Script as reuseable objects outside of a specific work’s use of a bf:Script, the current proposal does not recommend linking handwriting type information directly off from instances of bf:Script as if the individual of bf:Script was a particular use of a script.

An easier addition to the BF model would be to have a property like :hasHandwritingType directly off the bf:Instance or bf:Item and follow a very similar pattern as the Font pattern described above. The shortcoming of this is that there would be no obvious way of linking the :HandwritingType to the bf:Script, but currently cataloging practice does not aspire to this level of specificity and could be defined as future work if use cases called for it.

We propose reusing the writtenIn predicate to relate a bibliographic resource (most likely Instance or Item) to a particular example of Handwriting. We also recommend the predicate hasHandwritingType to relate a Handwriting instance to its HandwritingType, and dcterms:description to further describe the particular Handwriting and use of a HandwritingType. Note that writtenIn is reused from the Font pattern above. Predicates from the Measurement model could also be used to model handwriting size if deemed important to capture.

Diagram

Handwriting Type Diagram

RDF Sample

:it a :bf:Item ;
  ex:hasNotation :latin ;
  ex:writtenIn :HandWriting1 .

:Handwriting1 :hasHandwritingType :frenchGothicBookhand ;
  dcterms:description “French Gothic bookhand in university style (littera parisiensis)” .

:latin a owl:NamedIndividual, bf:Script .
:frenchGothicBookhand a owl:NamedIndividual, ex:HandwritingType .
:cursive a owl:NamedIndividual, :Style .

Term Definitions

Classes

Font

FontStyle

Typeface

Handwriting

HandwritingType

Predicates

writtenIn

hasTypeface

hasStyle

hasHandwritingType

Areas for future research - beyond present scope