Authorship Claim

When I talk to random people about what I'm doing this summer and they don't understand how such a database would be useful for anyone (and ask, instead of just giving me a blank stare), the authorship claim field is always the example I use. I don't call it the authorship claim field, but regardless, most readers are usually interested in the people who write the texts that we read, and it provides a good example of a potential faceted search with a variety of levels.
Faceted searching allows us to check correlations between certain patterns that we are interested in. Like statistical analysis, we can then maybe think about the reasons that such correlations exist. Or, alternatively, we can find a single outlier and question what makes it different and special in comparison to all other texts of that time/genre/author.

Does a given author use the work of certain poets as epigraph material? How often and where and when do the male authors of female texts represent themselves as females, and when they do, how often does a portrait of the female occur? (The reverse has -female author representing self as male with a portrait of the fictional male in question- occurred in at least one text, I think) Are male or female authors more likely to be named with a "By" or be anonymous or be referenced to by their other works? Even the subfields within the authorship claim field seem to provide uses for faceted searching.

The authorship claim field, specifically, is divided into:

‡a (Claim type - ex: Author) ‡1 (Name as it appears) ‡2 (Phrase in which the authorship claim appears) ‡3 (Location of Claim - ex: Title page) ‡4 (Authorship Claim Notes - ex:The author of the preface claims to be the author of the text to follow.) ‡5 (Gender Claim) ‡v (volume)

Subfield a has had some minor problems - sometimes the precise claim is can be ambiguous: author, translator, whatever. Perhaps most problematically is that we do not have time to go through the whole text and find authorship claims - where "I" is in a text, for example, and where that implies an authorship claim. Furthermore, authorship claims are somehow often so deeply stacked on top of each other that it's impossible to concisely convey the information in a database format. Author-translator-translator will get confused, for example, and the precise order of things won't necessarily be clearly shown. Further complicating the issue is the inclusion of both false and actual authorship claims in the database, while excluding certain types of false authorship claims (those included within the text itself).

Our solution right now is pretty haphazard - focus on the title page, try not to worry about too much about authorship claims in paratextual material, ignore authorship of paratextual material. It's a pretty knotty situation that isn't going to get resolved anytime soon.

Also, this is pretty useful, maybe, and has lead me to wonder exactly how this faceted search will become implemented, because that also has some pretty broad implications.

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/user_interface_implementations_of_faceted_browsing/