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#441 Add @who to the list of <stage> attributes
One of the goals of Folger Digital Texts is to create a sophisticated model of character interactions, including listing participants in each stage direction. Unfortunately, there appears to be no explicit way to add participant information into a <stage> element. We experimented with using @who in <move>, but ultimately decided that this misrepresented the nature of many character behaviours. After a lot of experimentation, we settled on doing including character participation info using @corresp, but it is clearly not ideal. @who added to <stage>, analogous to who it operates in <move>, would solve the problem.
A
<stage>can nest within a<sp>of course, so you could say that it inherits the @who from that. But stage directions often involve many people ("gives her the knife"), or no one ("a confused noise offstage") so I wonder whether you need something quite different. Some examples of what exactly you mean by "character participation info" would help -- certainly using @corresp makes no sense.Looking at the number of other elements which have @who, (change said q sp spGrp move u pause vocal kinesic incident writing shift setting) it's hard to see what harm there would be in adding stage as well, so long as we're clear what it means. All the other elements seem to use it to indicate agency -- @who identifies the person actually making the change, doing the move, pausing, in the setting, doing the speaking, etc. Does that fit with your concept of "participation"?
First, to clarify, we are using @ana, not @corresp, for identifying participants.
The <stage> should not inherit the @who from the <sp>. Consider, for example:
ORSINO
Seek him out [Curio exits,] and play the tune the while. [Music plays.]
In the example "gives her the knife", we had considered both the person who gives the knife and the person who receives it as participants. They are both responsible for making the change. But it would be useful to differentiate the subject from the object. In this case, would you recommend using @who for the giver and something else for the recipient?
I'd suggest you dont try and overload @who to the extent to saying in what way the person participates in the stage direction. Its just too hard:
"X stabs Y and in the struggle Z falls over and bangs his head. A screams, B
throws a pillow at X, C leers at the audience"
I don't think you can get a subject and object out of that, but you can get a sense that
X, Y, Z, A, B and C (and audience) are all active at this point.
I think I would put an ID on the stage element and use some other element to describe the killin'
Added
<stage>to att.ascribed at rev 11982