Pangur docsDating
A dating interpretation records your judgement about when a record or event dates from, with the evidence and reasoning behind it. This page explains the form, the date formats Pangur accepts, and how revisions and exports work.
A dating interpretation is your claim about when a record was written or an event happened, stated with the evidence and reasoning behind it. Dating belongs to a corpus. Pangur stores each interpretation as you give it and does no historical inference of its own: it checks that the date is well formed and that the evidence you cite matches the source, but it does not work out a date for you or convert between calendars.
Dating interpretations are separate from the dates a reading found. The date an analysis reading records is the date as the source gives it. A dating interpretation is a scholar's judgement about what that date means, or about a date the source does not give at all.
Adding a dating interpretation
Open a corpus and choose a record or an event in one of its views, such as Records or Timeline; its evidence opens beside the view. Under Dating interpretations, choose Add dating interpretation, fill in the form described below, and choose Save interpretation.
The new interpretation appears under Dating interpretations with its role, its wording or date, its certainty, and a marker if it is the preferred one. Opening it shows the reasoning, who it is attributed to, the calendar and the evidence.
In an organisation's project, editors and owners see Add dating interpretation and viewers do not.
The form's fields
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Date role | What the date is of. It defaults to "composition" for a record and "delivery" for an event; you can type another. |
| Source wording | The date as the source words it, if it does. |
| Date form | One of the forms in the next table. |
| Calendar | unspecified, Gregorian, Julian or other. |
| Calendar interpretation | A note on how you read the calendar. |
| Year begins | The year-start convention, such as "1 January" or "25 March". |
| Years have been interpreted with the stated year-start convention | Tick this when the years you entered have already been adjusted to that convention. Pangur does not assume a regional default. |
| Scholarly certainty | unspecified, high, medium or low. |
| Reasoning | Why you date it this way. Required. |
| Attributed to | Whose interpretation this is. Required. |
| Evidence source, Source revision, Page or passage | The evidence the interpretation rests on. All three are required. |
| Quotation | The words of the source that support it. Optional. |
| Use as preferred interpretation for this date role | Makes this the preferred interpretation for its role on this record, and clears the preference from any other. |
Date forms
| Form | What you enter |
|---|---|
| date | One date: a year, a year and month, or a full date. |
| bounds | An earliest and a latest date, each included or excluded. |
| duration | An earliest and a latest date for something that lasted. |
| alternatives | Two or more distinct dates, separated by commas, one of which is right. |
| relative | A relationship to another interpretation: before, after, not after, not before, at the same time, or offset by a number of days. |
| unknown | No date can be given. |
Dates are written as YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD, for example 1711-07, and you can add ? for an uncertain date, ~ for an approximate one or % for both at the end. These forms are a subset of the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF). Other EDTF forms are not accepted as text; they need the structured fields above, and Pangur reminds you of the accepted forms if you try one. Pangur also checks that bounds contain a possible date and that a day exists in the calendar you chose, so 29 February 1700 is accepted in the Julian calendar and refused in the Gregorian.
A relative interpretation depends on the one it refers to. If that interpretation is later changed or withdrawn, the relative one is marked as needing review.
Revisions
A corpus's dating is kept as a numbered series of revisions. Each save adds a revision, and no revision is ever overwritten. Every earlier interpretation must be carried into the next revision, either as it was or marked as withdrawn, and Pangur refuses a save that drops one, asking you to retain previous assertions and mark withdrawn claims explicitly.
If someone else saved a revision after you opened the form, Pangur refuses your save and asks you to read the current revision before saving. Reload the evidence and add your interpretation again.
When the evidence you cite is a source in the corpus's source inventory, Pangur checks the revision you name and, if you give one, that the quotation is in that source's text. If either check fails, it tells you that a cited source revision or quotation does not match the current reading.
The web form only adds interpretations. Withdrawing one, or making changes in bulk, is done through the command line or an assistant, both of which send a whole revision at once.
Dating from the command line and assistants
The command line reads and revises a corpus's dating:
pangur corpus dating CORPUS_ID
pangur corpus revise-dating CORPUS_ID revision.jsonrevise-dating sends a JSON revision containing the expected_version you read, every interpretation (with any you withdraw marked "status": "withdrawn") and a reason. Assistants connected over MCP use the tools corpus_dating and revise_corpus_dating in the same way (MCP tools).
Export and import
Pangur's API can export a corpus's dating as JSON, as TEI or as EDTF, and can read its revision history. It can also import dating from a TEI file of up to 20 MB, but only one that contains Pangur's own dating assertions, such as a file Pangur exported; other TEI is refused because it would need an explicit mapping. The web client has no button for export or import, and the command line has no command for them.
Explore a corpus
Once a corpus has been analysed, its views show the people, places, dates and events the readings found. This page is the reference for each view, its filters, and what each one counts and does not establish.
Source inventories and assistant-submitted analysis
Assistants and the command line can analyse sources with their own models and describe a corpus's sources with a source inventory. This page is the reference for submitting a reading to Pangur and for staging, activating and rolling back an inventory.