As discussed in the general section on provenance, information about the origin and subsequent history of a text-bearing object is collected in a history element that is part of the msDesc in the teiHeader. An origin element is used within history, and its child element origPlace is used for topographic and geographic assertions associated with the object's origin. origPlace is normally accompanied by an origDate element (q.v.), which is used to encode information about the date of origin.
origPlace has the same basic content model in the TEI as a p (paragraph) tag, so its contents can range from plain text to highly structured and cross-linked data (or a combination of both).
origPlace can carry both the type and subtype attributes. EpiDoc does not require the use of these attributes, nor does it constrain their values via the schema; however, the following values for the type attribute are recommended if useful for a given project:
| type | notes |
| composed | place of original (ancient) composition of the text |
| executed | place of original (ancient) execution of the text; i.e., where the physical support was when the text we have was placed upon it |
| sent | for a letter or other transmitted document: whence it was dispatched in antiquity |
| received | for a letter or other transmitted document: where it was delivered in antiquity |
| stored | for a portable document, such as a codex or papyrus roll, where it was habitually stored in antiquity |
The following examples illustrate some of the options.
A simple, plain-text example that assumes a narrow topographic context implied by the framing publication or corpus:
A more expanded example providing geographic context might be written thus:
A plain-text assertion that the place of origin is coincident with the place of finding (which is presumably described appropriately in a provenance element elsewhere in the history):
TEI markup can be added to deal with a wide variety of details, as in this example where multiple languages and writing systems are used:
Best practice is to mark placenames as such, using the appropriate TEI placeName element:
The information in the origPlace could be linked to an internal list of places/monuments with a key
The ref attribute can be used to link to a project-specific or external list or gazetteer that makes use of HTTP Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to identify individual structures or places:
In one of the simple examples above, the word "Findspot" was put inside origPlace to assert that the text-bearing object was found in situ. Some projects may want to be able to use software to identify programmatically and exploit such situations for fuller output, map-making, index creation, and the like. It is possible to write a script or transform that, upon encountering such a construct, attempts to look up a provenance element with the standard type="found" attribute value in the same file; however, it is not difficult to make such a cross reference more readily machine actionable in the XML. By using the corresp attribute to link origPlace to a provenance element that carries an xml:id attribute with a matching value, such connections are rendered more consistent and reliable. Note that any corresponding ID value could be used; "findspot" was chosen for this example because it is readily meaningful to the human reader.
The same technique is used in this extended example:
Other pages describing <history>:
Other pages describing <msDesc>:
Other pages describing <origin>:
Other pages describing <origDate>:
Other pages describing <origPlace>:
Other pages describing <p>:
Other pages describing <placeName>:
Other pages describing <provenance>:
Other pages describing <rs>:
Other pages describing <seg>:
Other pages describing <teiHeader>: