Re: journal article for next call?

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/27/13 7:26 AM, Antoine Isaac wrote:
>
>>
>> Wow, now it seems that I am the one confused ;-)
>> I didn't mean to make any comment on periodical, just on 'issuance',
>> which to me was the same as the much more intuitive notion of 'issue'.
>> To me an issue is not a collection--and that's what is implied by the
>> "Thing > CreativeWork > Collection > Issuance" from the current proposal.
>> But maybe I've wrongly understood the proposal...
>
>
> No, I think I wrongly understood your point. I thought you were saying that
> Issuance SHOULD be sub to Collection. And I was saying that Periodical
> SHOULD NOT be sub to collection.

On the most recent call, I was convinced that Issuance should not be
Intangible and should instead be subclassed to Collection because in
the context of an academic journal, newspaper, news journal, popular
magazine context it acts as a collection of articles, editorials,
letters to the editor, pictorial spreads, etc.

Many of the comics that I have in my (dated) personal collection
include a foreword where the editor / writer / artists may have
something to say to the readers, that is separate from the main story.
And some (hi Groo!) also include a letters section. In a description
of the contents of a given issue, one could very conceivably want to
cite separate CreativeWorks within the issue (for example, Alan Moore
as the author of a foreword to the V for Vendetta series in issue #1).
So the subclassing of Issuance to Collection still makes sense to me.

Even if a given issue collects just one CreativeWork, it doesn't
disturb me. (The Comics proposal includes a similar statement about a
series potentially consisting of a single one-shot issue, for what
it's worth).

However, in reviewing the comics proposal and considering these other
kinds of CreativeWorks that might be contained in a broader sense of
Periodical, perhaps the proposed Issuance property of "article", which
has a range of Article and is described as "An article contained in
this issue" is too specific? I do like the clarity of the current
proposal for handling most magazine / journal requirements, and am
wary of trying to satisfy too generic a need, but perhaps "article"
goes away and we just rely on the Collection "hasPart" property to
point at the CreativeWorks.

On the flip side, I've also started wondering if "Collection"'s
properties shouldn't simply be absorbed into CreativeWork. That would
resolve the problem of Books that collect individual articles, TV
episodes that contain multiple distinct stories, and probably many
other use cases.

> So we might have been saying the same
> thing. But I agree that Issuance-sub-Collection doesn't make sense, and I'm
> not sure that Issuance should have article page numbers, because I see that
> as a property of the article itself. That said....

I'm standing behind "pagination" as an Issuance-level property,
because we've seen in a number of examples so far of periodicals that
have continuing paginations (e.g. issue 1 has pages 1-150, issue 2 has
pages 151-300, etc), and the journal issues as displayed by the
publisher and various discovery layers feel that it is important
enough to include the pagination in the current displays. We need
"pagination" rather than Book's "numberOfPages" because there is no
way of knowing if the pagination is continuing or not with a plain
Integer value.

I agree that Articles can and should still have their own pagination
property. We could make it more complex than the current Text range
(something like http://schema.org/OpeningHoursSpecification?) but I'm
not sure if we really want to go there :)

> Here's what the comics proposal lists [1]:
>
>
>      Periodical Series - a sequential grouping of periodical issues - The
> New Yorker, Redbook, The Lancet, Amazing Spider-Man
>     Periodical Issues - individual instances of periodicals - The New Yorker
> Vol. 1, Issue 4
>     Individual comic issues - short-form, saddle-stitched, serially
> published comics (the pamphlet-sized comics seen in comic book stores and
> hobby shops) - Amazing Spider-Man# 600
>
> Their series includes the volume (even tho' the definition does not), so it
> looks like our issuance crosses their 'series' and 'issues'.

Yes, I've been puzzling over that for a while, and wondering if their
use case for "grouping of periodical issues" was perhaps focused on
story arcs, or runs with the same writer (back when Alan Moore took
over Swamp Thing, for example) or artist, rather than strictly on
volume. It's an interesting one!

> Their "Individual comic issue" seems to be an anthology of previously published
> items, most likely within a series, that might get a series statement in
> library cataloging.[2] It could be thought of as a collection, but I doubt
> if anyone will be listing the individual parts.

My interpretation was that Comic Issue was meant to simply model a
single issue of a 32-page (or whatever) comic book that you would pick
up at a comic store.

> They also have "Graphic
> novel" which is a monograph that extends book, but that isn't a re-print of
> things that were once part of a comic series.

Well... they have the "collectedIssues" property which explicitly says
that it is "a list of all issues collected in the graphic novel (for
collections of reprinted works)" to support both use cases, I believe.

> I think at this point we need a comparative table. I will try to do that.
> What I think this means, though, is that there will be different views so
> that periodicity may be used in a variety of ways at different bibliographic
> "levels." Which would mean that we need to impose little pre-conceived
> structure on properties like "issue" "volume" etc. so that people can use
> them as they exist within their own context.
>
> I don't know how we engage the comics folks on this, but it could be an
> interesting conversation.

I've CCed Peter Olson and Henry Andrews, who were part of the
discussion on public-vocabs back in February 2012. Hopefully they are
still interested!

>
> kc
>
> p.s. I KNEW that serials would be a headache!
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/PeriodicalsComics
> [2] I tried to find some examples, but libraries don't carry the flimsy
> comics, usually, and some seem to be doing funky cataloging of the ones they
> do buy, expecting that they won't last long. In any case, how libraries
> catalog comics shouldn't drive too much of our view, IMO.

There are examples like
http://marvel.com/comics/issue/43271/wolverine_the_x-men_2011_33 -
which make me think that a property for cover art & variant cover art
would be a good addition to the comics proposal.

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2013 17:06:46 UTC