P5: Linee guida per la codifica e l'interscambio del testo elettronico

TEI: The Apparatus Entry¶12.1.1 The Apparatus Entry

Individual textual variations are encoded using the app element, which groups together all the readings constituting the variation. The identification of discrete textual variations or apparatus entries is not a purely mechanical process; different editors may group readings differently. No rules are given here as to how to group readings into apparatus entries; the tags given here may be used to group readings in whatever way the editor finds most perspicuous or useful.

The individual apparatus entry is encoded with the app element:

• app (voce dell'apparato) contiene una singola voce in un apparato critico, con un lemma facoltativo e almeno una lettura

  type	classifica la variazione contenuta in tale elemento secondo una tipologia funzionale
  from	identifica, se necessario, l'inizio del lemma nel testo base
  to	identifica, se necessario, la fine del lemma nel testo base
  loc	(posizione) indica la posizione della variante in caso di utilizzo del metodo di indicazione della posizione della variante nella codifica dell'apparato

The attributes loc, from, and to, are used to link the apparatus entry to the base text, if present. In such cases, several methods may be used for such linkage, each involving a slightly different usage for these attributes. Linkage between text and apparatus is described below in section 12.2 Linking the Apparatus to the Text. For the use of the app element without a base text, see 12.2.3 The Parallel Segmentation Method.

TEI: Readings¶12.1.2 Readings

Individual readings are the crucial elements in any critical apparatus of variants. The following elements should be used to tag individual readings within an apparatus entry:

• lem (lemma) contiene il lemma, o testo base, di una variante testuale
• rdg (lettura) contiene un'unica lettura entro una variante testuale

N.B. the term lemma is used here in the text-critical sense of ‘the reading accepted as that of the original or of the base text’. This sense differs from that in which the word is used elsewhere in the Guidelines, for example as in the attribute lemma where the intended sense is ‘the root form of an inflected word’, or ‘the heading of an entry in a reference book, especially a dictionary’.

In recording readings within an apparatus entry, the rdg element may always be used; each app must contain at least one rdg.

The lem element may also be used, under some circumstances, to record the base text of the source edition, to mark the readings of a base witness, to indicate the preference of an editor or encoder for a particular reading, or to make clear, in cases of ambiguity, precisely which portion of the main text the variation applies to. Those who prefer to work without the notion of a base text may prefer not to use it at all. How it is used depends in part on the method chosen for linking the apparatus to the text; for more information, see section 12.2 Linking the Apparatus to the Text.

Readings may be encoded individually, or grouped for perspicuity using the rdgGrp element described in section 12.1.3 Indicating Subvariation in Apparatus Entries.

As members of the attribute classes att.witnessed and att.textCritical, both of these elements inherit the following attributes.

• att.witnessed supplies the attribute used to identify the witnesses supporting a particular reading in a critical apparatus.

  wit	(testimone o testimoni) contiene una lista di uno o più puntatori indicanti i testimoni che attestano una determinata lettura

• att.textCritical definisce un insieme di attributi comuni a tutti gli elementi che rappresentano letture di varianti nella lettura critica di un'opera

  type	classifica la lettura secondo una tipologia funzionale
  cause	classifica le ragioni di una lettura alternativa secondo una qualsiasi tipologia adeguata di origini possibili
  varSeq	(sequenza variante) fornisce un numero che indica la posizione di tale lettura all'interno di una sequenza, qualora ci sia motivo di supporre una sequenza rispetto alle varianti per un dato lemma
  hand	identifica la mano responsabile di una determinata lettura nel testimone

The att.textCritical class also inherits the following attributes from the att.responsibility class:

• att.responsibility provides attributes indicating who is responsible for something asserted by the markup and the degree of certainty associated with it.

  resp	(responsabile) indica il responsabile dell'intervento o interpretazione, per esempio un curatore o trascrittore
  cert	(certezza) corrisponde al grado di certezza associato all'intervento o interpretazione

As elsewhere, these attributes may be used to indicate the person responsible for the editorial decision being recorded, and also the degree of certainty associated with that decision by the person carrying out the encoding.

The wit attribute identifies the witnesses which have the reading in question. It is required if the apparatus gathers together readings from different witnesses, but may be omitted in an apparatus recording the readings of only one witness, e.g. substitutions, divergent opinions on what is in the witness or on how to expand abbreviations, etc. Even in such a one-witness apparatus, however, the wit attribute may still be useful when it is desired to record the occurrence of a particular reading in some other witness. For other methods of identifying the witnesses to a reading, see section 12.1.4 Witness Information.

The hand and resp attributes are intelligible only on an element recording a reading from a single witness, and should not be used if more than one witness is given on the same rdg or lem element. If more than one witness is given for the reading, they are undefined. To convey this information when the witness is one among several, the witDetail element should be used; see section 12.1.4 Witness Information.

Where there is a greater weight of editorial discussion and interpretation than can conveniently be expressed through the attributes provided on these elements (for example where there are multiple witnesses for a single reading or multiple editorial responsibility for an emendation) this information can be attached to the apparatus in a note, or recorded in the feature structure notation defined in chapter 18 Feature Structures. In particular, such recurring text-critical situations as palaeographic confusion of particular letters, or homœoarchy or homœoteleuton involving specific character groups, may lend themselves to feature structure treatment. Information concerning these recurrent situations may be encoded into database-like fragments within the text which would then be available to sophisticated computer-assisted analysis. Further work remains to be done on such mechanisms, however, and so no examples are given here of the use of feature structures in text-critical apparatus.

Encoders should be aware of the distinct fields of use of the attribute values wit, hand, and resp. Broadly, wit identifies the physical entity in which the reading is found (manuscript, clay tablet, papyrus, printed edition); hand refers to the agent responsible for inscribing that reading in that physical entity (scribe, author, inscriber, hand 1, hand 2); resp indicates the scholar responsible for asserting the existence of that reading in that physical entity. In some cases, the categories may blur: a scholar may produce an edition introducing readings for which he or she is responsible; that edition may itself become a witness in a later critical apparatus. Thus, readings introduced as corrections in the earlier edition will be seen in the later apparatus as witnessed by the earlier edition. As observed in the discussion concerning the discrimination of hand and resp in transcription of primary sources in section 11.3.2.2 Hand, Responsibility, and Certainty Attributes, the division of layers of responsibility through various scholars for particular aspects of a particular reading may require the more complex mechanisms for assigning responsibility described in chapter 21 Certainty, Precision, and Responsibility.

TEI: Indicating Subvariation in Apparatus Entries¶12.1.3 Indicating Subvariation in Apparatus Entries

The rdgGrp element may be used to group readings, either because they have identical values on one or more attributes, or because they are seen as forming a self-contained variant sequence, or for some other reason. This grouping of readings is entirely optional: no such grouping of readings is required.

• rdgGrp (gruppo di letture) all'interno di una variante testuale raggruppa due o più letture considerate imparentate o affini

The rdgGrp element is a member of class att.textCritical and therefore can carry the wit, type, cause, varSeq, hand, and resp attributes described in the preceding section. When values for any of these attributes are given on a rdgGrp element, the values given are inherited by the rdg or lem elements nested within the reading group, unless overridden by a new specification on the individual reading element.

Similarly, rdgGrp may be used to organize the substantive variants of an apparatus entry. Editors may need to indicate that each of a group of witnesses may be taken as all supporting a particular reading, even though there may be variation concerning the exact form of that reading in, or the degree of support offered by, those witnesses. For example: one may identify three substantive variants on the first word of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue in the manuscripts: these might be expressed in regularized spelling as Experience, Experiment, and Eriment. In fact, the manuscripts display many different spellings of these words, and a scholar may wish both to show that the manuscripts have all these variant spellings and that these variant spellings actually support only the three regularized spelling forms. One may term these variant spellings as ‘subvariants’ of the regularized spelling forms.

This subvariation can be expressed within an app element by gathering the readings into three groups according to the normalized form of their reading. All the readings within each group may be accounted subvariants of the main reading for the group, which may be indicated by tagging it as a lem element or as <rdg type='groupBase'>.

TEI: Witness Information¶12.1.4 Witness Information

A given reading is associated with the set of witnesses attesting it by listing the witnesses in the wit attribute on the rdg, lem, or rdgGrp element. Special mechanisms, described in the following sections, are needed to associate annotation on a reading with one specific witness among several (section 12.1.4.1 Witness Detail Information), to transcribe witness information verbatim from a source edition (section 12.1.4.2 Witness Information in the Source), and to identify the formal lists of witnesses typically provided in the front matter of critical editions (section 12.1.4.3 The Witness List).

TEI: Fragmentary Witnesses¶12.1.5 Fragmentary Witnesses

If a witness is incomplete (whether a single fragment, a series of fragments, or a relatively complete text with one or more lacunae), it is usually desirable to record explicitly where its preserved portions begin and end. The following empty tags, which may occur within any lem or rdg element, indicate the beginning or end of a fragmentary witness or of a lacuna within a witness:

• witStart/ (inizio di testimone frammentario) indica l'inizio o la ripresa del testo di un testimone frammentario
• witEnd/ (fine di testimone frammentario) indica la fine o l'interruzione del testo di un testimone frammentario
• lacunaStart/ indica l'inizio di una lacuna nel testo di un testimone quasi completo
• lacunaEnd/ indica la fine di una lacuna nel testo di un testimone quasi completo

These elements constitute the class model.rdgPart, members of which are permitted within the elements lem and rdg when the module defined by this chapter is included in a schema.

TEI: The Location-referenced Method¶12.2.1 The Location-referenced Method

The location-referenced method of encoding apparatus provides a convenient method for encoding printed apparatus; in this method as in most printed editions, the apparatus is linked to the base text by indicating explicitly only the block of text on which there is a variant (noted usually by a canonical reference scheme, or by line number in the edition, such as A 137 or Page 15 line 1).

Where it is intended that the apparatus be complete enough to allow the reconstruction of the witnesses (or at least of their non-orthographic variations), simple location-reference methods are unlikely to be as successful as the other two methods, which allow the unambiguous reconstruction of the lemma from the encoding.

TEI: The Double End-Point Attachment Method¶12.2.2 The Double End-Point Attachment Method

In the double end-point attachment method, the beginning and end of the lemma in the base text are both explicitly indicated. It thus differs from the location-referenced method, in which only the larger span of text containing the lemma is indicated. Double end-point attachment permits unambiguous matching of each variant reading against its lemma. It or the parallel-segmentation method should be used in all cases where this is desired, for example where the apparatus is intended to enable full reconstruction of the text, or of the substantives, of every witness.

When the double end-point attachment method is used, the from and to attributes of the app element are used to indicate the beginning and ending points of the reading in the base text: their values are identifiers which occur at the locations in question. If no other markup is present there, the beginning and ending points should be marked using the anchor element defined in chapter 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment. In cases where it is not possible to insert anchors within the base text (e.g. where the text is on a read-only medium) the beginning and end of the lemma may be indicated by using the ‘indirect pointing’ mechanisms discussed in chapter 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment. Explicit anchors are more likely to be reliable, and are therefore to be preferred.

The lemma need not be repeated within the app element in this method, as it may be extracted reliably from the base text. If an exhaustive list of witnesses is available, it will also not be necessary to specify just which manuscripts agree with the base text to enable reconstruction of witnesses. An application will be able to determine the manuscripts that witness the base reading, by noting which witnesses are attested as having a variant reading, and inferring the base text reading for all others after adjusting for fragmentary witnesses and for witnesses carrying overlapping variant readings.

This method is designed to cope with ‘overlapping lemmata’. For example, at line 117 of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, the manuscripts Hg (Hengwrt), El (Ellesmere), and Ha4 (British Library Harleian 7334) read:

Hg

And of so parfit wys a wight ywroght

El

And for what profit was a wight ywroght

Ha4

And in what wise was a wight ywroght

Because creation and interpretation of double end-point attachment apparatus will be lengthy and difficult it is likely that they will usually be created and examined by scholars only with mechanical assistance.

TEI: The Parallel Segmentation Method¶12.2.3 The Parallel Segmentation Method

This method differs from the double end-point attachment method in that all variants at any point of the text are expressed as variants on one another. In this method, no two variations can overlap, although they may nest. Thus, the concepts of a base text and of a lemma become unnecessary: the texts compared are divided into matching segments all synchronized with one another. This permits direct comparison of any span of text in any witness with that in any other witness. It is also very easy with this method for an application to extract the full text of any one witness from the apparatus.

This method will (by definition) always be satisfactory when there are just two texts for comparison (assuming they are in the same language and script). It will also be useful where editors do not wish to privilege a text as the ‘base’ or when editors wish to present parallel texts. It will become less convenient as traditions become more complex and tension develops between the need to segment on the largest variation found and the need to express the finest detail of agreement between witnesses.

This method cannot be used with external apparatus: it must be used in-line. Note that apparatus encoded with this method may be translated into the double end-point attachment method and back without loss of information. Where double-end-point-attachment encodings have no overlapping lemmata, translation of these to the parallel segmentation encoding and back will also be possible without loss of information.

Alternatively, the witnesses for every reading may be stated, as in the first example.

Parallel segmentation cannot, however, deal very gracefully with variants which overlap without nesting: such variants must be broken up into pieces in order to keep all witnesses synchronized.

TEI: Other Linking Methods¶12.2.4 Other Linking Methods

When an apparatus is provided it does not need to be given at the location in the transcription where the variation, emendation, attribution, or other apparatus observation occurs. Instead it may be stored in a separate place in the same file, or indeed in another file, and point to the location at which it is meant to be used. Storing apparatus entries separately can be beneficial when encoding multiple competing, potentially overlapping, interpretations of the same point in the source texts.

The location-referenced method can be used to point a position in a text using the loc attribute and a canonical reference that is understood and documented in the context of the file where it is used. Where possible it is recommended that other methods use the from attribute to point to an xml:id attribute on an anchor or other element at the location where the apparatus observation takes place. The contents of an element pointed to are understood to be equivalent to a lem if none exists in the app, and if a lem does exist this should replace any content.

If only the from attribute is provided then it should be understood that this supplies the location of the textual variance that the apparatus documents. If the from attribute contains an XPointer scheme that identifies a range of text (or elements) then this is understood to record the starting and ending of the range as in the double end-point attachment method. In such a case a @to attribute is unnecessary.