RE: journal article for next call?

Hi all - 

I am always happy to talk about comic semantics.  This probably says more about me than it should. 

I'll talk a little bit about how we model comics internally - the schema.org proposal is a simplification of this (we kind of omit the lowest level of the hierarchy in that in order to make it easier for people like comics retailers to implement).  Our model is derived from the comics.org model (and they have done a lot of good work in terms of creating workable comic models that capture the range of behaviors in comics).

We have a hierarchical model for comics: series collect issues and issues collect stories, stories being an indivisible unit of a comic.  The term "story" is a bit overloaded, but can be thought of as roughly analogous to an article in a magazine.  It means any indivisible, re-printable unit of a comic, including the interior stories, covers, backmatter, etc.  For example, most comics have two stories - a cover and an interior story.  Many comics, however, have multiple stories - a cover, a handful of interior stories, and whatever backmatter.  Amazing Fantasy #15 (http://marvel.com/comics/issue/16926/amazing_fantasy_1962_15) is an example of this - there were several stories including one about a wizard, a Martian invasion and a short throwaway piece about some kid getting bitten by a spider.  Anthology books like this are still fairly common - A+X is one which is currently published (http://marvel.com/comics/series/16450/ax_2012_-_present).  

Stories can be (and often are) reprinted in issues and collections (e.g. trade paperbacks, hardcovers etc.), so we track creative assignments and character appearances at the story level. In our system, collections and graphic novels are functionally identical to other comics (a collection just has a larger number of collected stories).  We generally track the stories in collections and then bubble up the collected issues from the stories' original appearance.  For formality we require all comics, including collections and graphic novels, to have a series so we assign collections to a series of one issue.

Let me know if you have more specific questions.   Always happy to help.

-peter


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Scott [mailto:denials@gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 12:06 PM
To: Karen Coyle
Cc: public-schemabibex@w3.org; Henry Andrews; Olson, Peter
Subject: 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.
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Received on Saturday, 30 November 2013 22:41:57 UTC