This article is published as part of
In the textual tradition of a literary work, our
sources (manuscripts, printed books etc.) commonly
bear, together with the "main text", different
kinds of "paratexts" commenting on it (including
interlinear annotations, glosses, scholia,
footnotes, modern scholarly introductions and
commentaries, and many others). This article
proposes a unified model for a document-based
digital critical edition including both the main texts and the paratexts as they appear in
different single sources. The problematic aspects
of such an "enlarged" digital edition are
discussed, including the relations between the
different paratexts and the
main text they refer to
within each single textual
source, as well as the "alignment" of
different main texts and
paratexts in different
sources.
Critical editions, i.e.
editions of texts with a text-critical apparatus,
respond to the necessity of representing one
aspect of the complex reality of textual
tradition: the textual variance. Their function is
double: on the one hand, they present the
different versions of a text within the context of
the textual tradition; on the other hand, they try
to ‘extract’, out of the different Mordenti
2001, pp. 47-52 has an interesting
discussion on the many different functions
of a ‘traditional’ critical edition.texts born by many carriers
(manuscripts, incunabula,
modern and contemporary print editions), a
reconstructed Text, the
closest possible to the ‘original’ one prior to
its ‘corruption’ due to the very process of
textual tradition, thus ideally recovering the
Adopting the traditional
opposition of ‘document vs. text’, we could say
that the ideal movement of a critical edition is
from the physical documents (the sources) to the
abstract text On this dichotomy, and on the digital
models of text and of the document, see
Ciotti
1994, pp. 220-224.
Within each document, the philologist selects the text to be included in his edition, and ignores whatever other texts may be carried by that source – such as different levels of glosses to the text, as well as other works by the same author, or belonging to the same literary genre, that happen to have been copied into the same codex, or published into the same print edition. The result of his selection is what we call, e.g., “codex A’s text of Ovid’s
My personal research background relates
principally to classical Latin literature,
and to Classics in general. Not only this
will affect the choice of examples
throughout this article, but, as the
reader will easily note, the bulk of my
reflection originates from the specific
task of editing classical literary texts
that tend to have a long and complex
tradition, in which the numerous
(handwritten and printed) testimonies of
the literary text are often accompanied by
a complex corpus of different kinds of
To sum up the process, we
could say that a first selection takes place when
the philologist extracts the ‘texts’ out of the
documents. This selection happens while the
philologist transcribes the textual variants
carried by the primary sources but, just like the
whole transcription process, it is rarely described The transcription-encoding process has been
at the center of the theoretical
reflection on the digital critical
edition: see Mordenti 2001, pp. 53-82 and
Adamo
1987.
The digital critical edition approximately
aims to do the same work, but taking advantage of
the flexibility offered by technology. In
particular, it promises to accomplish better the
goal of presenting in detail the textual variance
(down to the detail level of the very sources of
the text, both transcribed and reproduced with
digital images). This provides two main
advantages:
- a digital critical edition allows the reader to verify and call into question the work of the editor
- it builds up an ‘open’ model of the text,
not implying that the text created by the
editor is
thetext.
However, in many of the
primary sources that constitute the tradition of a
text we can find around the ‘main text’ – so to
speak – other texts, that point in different ways
to it – e.g., a series of glosses or I am grateful to Dr. Patrick Sahle, of the
University of Cologne, who, in his review
of the paper before its publication,
encouraged me to switch from the original
term I had adopted, i.e. “metatext”, to
“paratext” (within the theoretical frame
given by Genette
1987). The first term was meant
to draw attention particularly to the most
explicit forms of ‘commentary’ on the text
(such as glosses and modern foot- or
endnotes), which used to be the original
main focus of my reflections. But the term
“paratext” has the indubitable advantages
of relying on a terminology
well-established in the studies on
textuality, and of including a broader
range of textual objects that my model
will take into account, such as
handwritten rubrics, chapter numbering,
copyright information at the beginning of
print editions etc. The use of the plural
(paratextparatexts, as
opposed to what we will call maintext, since the former comment on
the latters)
aims to highlight the plurality and
diversity of such ‘secondary texts’ within
a textual tradition as well as within a
single witness of the text.
The overall content of a
document may display a differentiated, and
problematic, range of ‘levels of paratextuality’.
A complex document such as a modern print edition
of a classical Latin work – not even a critical
edition, but just a good ‘commercial’ paperback
including text, translation and some notes – might
provide, at the beginning of the book, together
with the title and author of the work, a plethora
of typographical and bibliographical information
on the book (the document) itself, including the
modern editor(s), the translator, the publication
place, etc.; then, a preface by a well known
scholar, commenting on the poetics of the author,
its time, the sense of his whole literary
production; then again, an introduction by the
editor of the edition, commenting more closely on
the work published. All sorts of biographical,
metrical, textual-critical prefatory notes could
follow, and our maintext would not yet have begun.
Then, we can imagine the Latin maintext on the
left pages, and its translation on the facing
page. One also expects to find, in a really good
paperback edition, at least some textual-critical
notes below the Latin maintext informing the
reader on the most meaningful variants, and some
erudite explanatory footnotes below the modern
translation, to assist the reader with the
comprehension of the text. Those commentary
footnotes, of course, could also be placed at the
end of the maintext as endnotes, without changing
the meaning of their relation to the maintext.
After the whole text and commentary, a number of
indices (
The typical situation of a
worthy manuscript is simpler in some ways, but not
as much as one might think: other than the
marginal commentary glosses, many codices present
supralinear insertions, ranging from the typology
of the Do these kinds of annotations belong to the
maintext, or to a very ‘close’ level of
paratexuality? – we will address this
issue later.
Such a rich ‘ground cover’ of secondary texts (paratexts), ‘growing’ upon and around a primary text (our maintext), is an interesting textual phenomenon belonging to the complex reality of a literary tradition, and surely one that deserves to be represented.
Among those texts, in
particular the ancient
My proposal is to elaborate a digital model to ‘edit’ (that is to give a representation of) the complex phenomenon of the relations between a maintext and each paratext commenting on it (or just ‘pointing’ to it) in the handwritten and print tradition of that text.
Such a model should include
both the maintexts and the paratexts of each
source, expressing explicitly the relation between
single portions of each paratext and the precise
portions of maintext they refer to. This implies
that, rather than a traditional edition of
of the text and
of its ancient (and modern) commentaries – and the
relationships between the text and its
commentaries.
Let us imagine now, within
the textual tradition of a literary work, four
sources: Obviously this list does not pretend to be
exhaustive in any way: its only sense is
to give an idea of what I mean for
‘paratextuality levels’.a (a manuscript);
b (another manuscript);
c (a modern print
critical edition); and d (a
modern commercial – not critical – print edition).
If we agree to call maintext(a) the maintext of
the source a, paratext(a)1
one of the paratexts attached to the maintext in
the source a and so on, a
plausible list of texts involved in the
construction of our edition would include:
- maintext(a)
- paratext(a)1 {
rubricae } - paratext(a)2 {explanatory glosses}
- maintext(b)
- paratext(b)1 {glosses}
- maintext(c)
- paratext(c)1 {philological introduction}
- paratext(c)2 {scholarly commentary to the text}
- maintext(d)
- paratext(d)1 {frontispiece etc.}
- paratext(d)2 {preface}
- paratext(d)3 {prefatory essay}
- paratext(d)4 {introduction}
- paratext(d)5 {commentary footnotes}
What we mean to do is to
instruct the computer to read the TEI-compliant
transcriptions of the primary sources
(transcription(a), transcription(b) etc.), My model does not require necessarily that
the TEI-XML markup conventions be adopted,
yet the TEI is, so far, the framework
within which I imagine this project to be
developed, and the TEI P5 Guidelines will
be the main reference for the encoding
conventions in the examples – see in
particular chapter 11,
aand parses a code such as the following
One could argue that this gloss actually comments on the single word “Theseus”, and not on the entire line. We could easily account for this more detailed information, if we structured the transcriptions markup – or at least some portions of it – at a word (not line) level by using <w>, not <l> elements. All textual examples in this papers will be taken from Latin classical texts, but modified in some instances to illustrate the argument being made.
<l n="1.200"
xml:id="1.190">Theseus <note
place = "supralinear" type = "explanatory
glossa">rex
Atheniensium</note> […] rapuit
</l>
it understands that
“Theseus […] rapuit” belongs to the paratextuality
level I shall define better later the way these
‘objects’ (that I will also call
‘paratextuality level-files’) could be
realized, keeping in mind that their only
function is to store the linking
information about a particular
paratextuality level in a specific
source. The linking strategies to be adopted are
discussed below. Surely the more efficient
way to identify at least the portions of
maintext within a transcription will be a
consistent system of @xml:id
attributes.maintext, and is
therefore a part of the object maintext(a), and
that “rex Atheniensium” belongs to the
paratextuality level ‘explanatory glosses’, and
therefore to the object paratext(a)1,id is “1.190”.
The computation on the TEI-XML markup of transcriptions/descriptions of primary sources to deduce extensive information about the paratextuality levels may appear ‘smooth’, as far as we confine ourselves to simple examples such as the one above.
But however refined the
software we create might be, on many occasions it
will find itself at pains to ‘translate’ the
transcription markup into information about the
paratextuality level, simply because the task of
bearing information about our defined
‘paratextuality levels’ is not the purpose for
which a standard TEI-compliant transcription of a
primary source is written, and – I would add – for
which the whole TEI-XML transcription markup was developed. The TEI-XML transcription of a manuscript,
in particular, tends to be focused
primarily on the description of the
physical disposition of the text on the
page, even while combining such
information with other informational
levels (for example, the ‘abstract’
internal structure of the text
itself).
From a practical point of
view, we can ask ourselves now whether any TEI-compliant
transcription already available for the sources
that constitute the textual tradition of a text
would be suitable for the edition, or if we shall
finally find ourselves compelled to create and use
exclusively our own “project-oriented”
transcriptions.
The problem is that, in the latter case, we would create markup strongly oriented towards the needs of a specific research project, and such a practice would break a principle which, in my opinion, should inform any project elaborated in the Digital Humanities, especially in this still ‘pioneering’ stage of its development: any project should tend to the highest degree of standardization possible. The input-data themselves (in our case, the transcriptions) should be based on existing standards in order to allow the project to build on the work of other researchers, and to ensure that the output may be re-used by other projects. When there are relatively few people working in a research field, and when the paths followed by those different researchers diverge, standardization becomes a critical issue. By using standard technology, researchers ensure that their work will not become incomprehensible to others.
But such practical
considerations (about the possible need of
‘purpose-created’ transcriptions) invite us to
raise a more theoretical issue – though bound to
very practical ones – concerning the amount and
nature of the information to be encoded in the
transcriptions, and the responsibility of the
transcriber and the editor to make their
text-critical decisions, ‘Transcriber’ refers here to the creator of
the transcription, whereas ‘editor’ refers
to the philologist who creates the whole
edition. The two may be the same
individual, different individuals, or even
the same, different, or overlapping groups
of people. 'User' refers to the end-user of the
edition.
We can imagine a situation
where the choice about the paratextuality level
assigned to a portion of text has been made by the
transcriber (the
creator of a source’s transcription), and
explicitly ‘encoded’ into the transcription
itself. An XML code like the following (an example
we’ve already seen above):
<l n="1.200"
xml:id="1.190">Theseus <note
place = "supralinear" type = "explanatory
glossa">rex
Atheniensium</note> […]
rapuit</l>
bears unambiguous information about the assignment of a paratextuality level (‘explanatory gloss’) to “rex Atheniensium”.
As an example of the editor’s choice (that is of
the person who cures the actual digital edition),
we can imagine the case where an editor has
decided to instruct the software to assign by
default a certain paratextuality level to a
certain markup pattern, for example deciding that
all text encoded as follows (please note the lack
of the ‘interpretive’ attribute @type):
<l n="1.200"
xml:id="1.190">Theseus <note
place = "supralinear">rex
Atheniensium</note> […]
rapuit</l>
belongs to the
paratextuality level ‘explanatory gloss’, and
therefore, since it is carried by source a, to the object
paratext(a)1.
The point is that such decisions about paratextuality level assignments (both those encoded in the transcription by the transcriber and those made by the editor when creating or configuring the software) may often be problematic and questionable, due to the ‘blurring’ of the paratextuality levels into each other.
In the last example above, for instance, the user could re-examine the textual situation (i.e. both the text and the assumed gloss), and also the digital image of the primary source, if available, and finally argue that the words written over the line (“rex Athenienium”) constitute not a gloss, but part of the maintext.
In a situation like the one
we outlined above (i.e.: ‘paratextuality
level-neuter’ transcription markup, paratextuality
level-switches due to a different judgment on the
paratextuality level a piece of text belongs to),
Willard McCarty thinks that the software managing
the digital edition should allow the user to
change the paratextuality level-assignment to that
portion of text. This suggestion is part of the vey useful
feedback that I received from Prof.
McCarty during the discussion the
discussion at the Centre for Computing in
the Humanities I mentioned aboveown choice).
Naturally, such a
‘flexible’ software could allow also the editor,
during the construction of
the digital edition, to assign the paratextuality
level-assignment case by case. Willard McCarty’s
suggestion is therefore to create (or re-use),
‘paratextuality level-neuter’ transcriptions, so
to speak, which should not bear any explicit
information about the assignment of paratextuality
levels, and to transfer as many of the
interpretative choices as possible to the software
level, for the very simple reason that it would be
difficult for the user to change the
transcriptions, which are the ‘input-data’ of the
system, whereas the software we create can be made
flexible enough to allow for ‘paratextuality
level-shifts’.
In general terms, I agree with this point of view, particularly when it comes to the need of giving the user ways to ‘modify’ the edition itself in case of diverging opinions about certain editorial choices. In view of the realization of our project, though, doubt remains whether the encoder can create (and the software can work on) a transcription markup completely free of interpretive information about the paratextuality levels.
But not only a single
portion of text can have an ambiguous status: from
a wider point of view, the interpretation of a
whole paratextuality level (belonging to one of
the many possible paratext
categories) in terms of its relation with the
maintext could be problematic. For example:
manuscript c containing a
collection of tales, in which each tale is
preceded by a short summary of the story (in the
transcription, something like <div
type="summary">). A specific paratextuality
level, called paratext(c)4, could be created to
include all summaries within source c. But this is one of the
cases where the user might want to make decisions
about the ‘role’ of the paratextuality level. He
could choose to ‘include’ those summaries in the
text, and therefore have it displayed on screen,
have text analysis software search through it
together with the maintext etc. Or he might choose
to ‘separate’ the paratext(c)4 from the maintext
completely.
This takes us to a model
where the single paratextuality levels, in their
turn, can be grouped into what we could call
‘families of paratextuality levels’. An example,
relative to a source d (a
print edition) could be the following:
-
Family “A” {the ‘core’: the text to be read sequentially}, including:
-
maintext(d)
-
paratext(d)1 {paragraph numbers}
-
paratext(d)2 {titles of paragraphs and chapters}
-
-
Family “B” {in-line material not belonging to the ‘core’}, including:
-
paratext(d)3 {‘in-line’ rubrics}
-
paratext(d)4 {‘in-line’ summaries}
-
-
Family “C” {commentary}, including:
-
paratext(d)5 {footnotes}
-
paratext(d)6 {endnotes, printed after the maintext}
-
-
Family “D” {prefatory material}, including:
-
paratext(d)7 {introduction}
-
paratext(d)8 {prefatory essay}
-
-
Family “E” {bibliographical coordinates of the volume}, including:
-
paratext(d)9 {frontispiece}
-
paratext(d)10 {copyright information and warnings}
-
-
The above list of paratextuality levels runs through an ideal range of ‘paratextuality’, from those texts ideally ‘closer’ to the maintext, up to paratext(d)10, which can be said to ‘comment on’ the maintext only in a very loose and general sense.
To be precise, one could argue that it comments on the book as a physical document, than on the ‘abstract text’ represented by the maintext.
Let us delineate now the relational structure of our model.
The whole project
originates from a specific attention to the
‘document’ (i.e. the primary source for both
the maintext and the paratext I owe many suggestions to Thaller
2004, especially about the need
to base the digital scholarly editions
on a standardized, wide base of
digital reproductions and
transcriptions of textual primary
sources. I also agree very much, as it
is already clear, with his idea of the
digital edition as a process where
many actors (from the transcriber, to
the scholarly editor, including what I
call the ‘user’) play their role. In
the same volume, another paper I owe
much to is Huitfeld 2004.
On the contrary,
keeping in mind the quite obvious
consideration that any commentary, though
aiming to be a commentary on That is, a commentary on a certain
version of the maintext.the Text, is always necessarily a
commentary on one textx) is directly
connected to its own
maintext(x), that
is to the maintext of the source x that bears both. The
resulting structure would look like this:
However, in the
resulting model the ‘alignment’ among the
paratexts (and the maintexts) carried by
different sources becomes an issue: we need to
put, within each transcription, some
‘milestones’ to create the cross-references
between corresponding portions of different
maintexts, and between those portions and the
parts of the different paratexts commenting on them We could call such portions of the
paratexts ‘annotations’, but this
would be an incomplete definition as
an introductory essay, for instance,
could be considered a paratext
(commenting on the whole
maintext).
An issue like the
alignment of the different versions of the
text and between text and
-
in ‘classical’, well attested literary texts, the discrepancies between the texts of the different sources (including
lacunae , verse order alterations etc.) are normally too slight to constitute a serious problem for the traditional alignment practices in non-electronic editions; -
in poetic texts, the progressive numbering of verses provides a good, almost ‘natural’ means to ‘partition’ the text
Yet, a first example of exception to this (only apparent) ease is given by ancient Greek lyric texts, with no certain distinctions between the verses.
-
for prose texts, the principle of the “authoritative edition” (see, e.g., Plato or Aristotle’s editions), that is partitioning the text after the page and row numberings of a well-known past edition, is considered efficient enough for the formalization standards required by non-electronic processing of texts;
-
this takes us to the fundamental point: whenever a text is edited in order to be read and analysed by the reader, the partitioning strategies take into account the obvious fact that ultimately it will be the reader himself, with the help of synoptic tables of concordances
Those are required, e.g., when concurrent numbering systems are proposed in different editions (let us think of the editions of Aesop’s fables). Many print editions of prose texts solve those issues by showing parallel numberings in-line or in the margins, and sometimes a differentiation of the formatting conventions is required to distinguish one numbering system from the other. The alignment between the
scholia and their ‘target’ in the text in print scholastic editions is often reached recalling the most diffused segmentation system of the maintext, and through the use (which in some cases turns out to be very useful) oflemmata , repeating in the paratext the precise portion of the maintext being commented. The need to use thelemmata shows in itself, I think, the arbitrary nature and the not complete efficiency of text partitioning conventions that can vary together with the change of the ‘reference’ editions.
But since the intelligence of a human being is (in most cases today) much more flexible than that of a computer, when we create electronic texts – meant to be processed automatically by computers – the text segmentation system must be formalized in a much more rigorous way. The easiest way is inserting such ‘milestones’ in the tagging of each transcription (both of the maintexts and of the paratexts), but even then a number of issues arise.
Confining ourselves to
verse texts, for which partitioning and
numbering problems are reasonably easy to
approach, we must consider that many phenomena
quite common in the manuscripts – but also
present in print editions – can alter in a
single source the numbering of verses (and
poems). These phenomena include interpolations
(portions of text born by a source, but
supposedly absent in the ‘original’); entire
verses missing, intentionally expunged, or
accidentally lost in the process of
transcription; transposition of verses This case is very common in modern
print editions, even though in those
cases the verse numbering ‘of the
manuscripts’ is often preserved. But
we can have manuscripts, or
non-critical print editions, where
such transpositions are not
highlighted by the use of the old
numbering, because of a lack of cure
by the editor of that source, or
simply because the transposition was
not intentional.
In all those cases, the
scholars normally anchor the numbering to an
abstract model of the text. For example, in
the case of a generalized
must have
existed in the ‘original’ text, a progressive
verse number is often assigned even to the
‘phantasm verses’ that exist only in our
abstract (not connected with any source)
reconstruction of the text. We could cite the
following passage, from the tenth poem of the
first book of Tibullus’ elegies:
After verse 25, a
In the opposite case, represented by interpolations, a portion of text actually born by at least one source is commonly not assigned any numbering, because it is commonly judged by the scholars as extrinsic to the ‘original’ (i.e. reconstructed) text.
Keeping in mind that the transcriptions are the groundwork of our project, and that we need to partition and ‘label’ the text as it appears in each single source, the issue of aligning texts between sources becomes central.
If we confine
ourselves to creating a different,
‘idiosyncratic’ numbering system for every
single source, only taking into account its
actual, peculiar
sequence of verses (i.e. all and only the
verses which that source contains), we would
face a situation where, for instance, line 200
of manuscript a (full
of interpolations) could well correspond to
line 190 of manuscript b, because b does
not include a’s
interpolations (though it may include others),
and has a long a corresponds to (i.e. is a different
version of) line 190 in b, and therefore to understand that the
gloss of paratext(b)1 commenting on line 190
of maintext(b) can also be seen, in a broader
sense, as a comment on line 200 of
maintext(a).
The only way to
overcome this problem seems to be the one that
Prof. Tito Orlandi suggested to me during an
interesting discussion in Rome: we need to
develop a unifying numbering system (not
mirroring any specific source), an abstract
‘Alignment-Text’, which we can imagine as a
‘pure structure’, a ‘blank’ sequence of place
holders (in TEI-XML terms, a simple sequence
of blank elements marked by non-ambiguous
@xml:id attributes), each identifying
unambiguously a textual
one source (but
obviously recurring, in most cases, in all
sources). Consequently, even the most evident
interpolation in the most complex manuscripts,
or print editions, would be included, but the
‘phantasm verses’ like those whose existence
we reconstructed for Tibullus’ elegy above
shouldn’t.
In the case of a verse
text, in each single TEI-XML transcription a
verse (an <l> element), or any
other portion of the maintext, could be
identified by both an @n attribute, referring
to whatever numbering system we want One could use an ‘idiosyncratic’
numbering system counting the actual
verses that appear in that version of
the text; or a ‘conventional’
numbering including also the ‘phantasm
verses’ of the lacunae; or whatever
else be useful for the visualization
of that text on screen.a could be tagged
as follows:
<l n = "1.200"
xml:id="1.190">
and the corresponding
line 190 in the transcription of manuscript
b:
<l n = "1.190"
xml:id="1.190">
What the
Alignment-Text file (A-Txt.xml) should
actually look like is not a point that I will
discuss in any detail in this paper. In any
case, I lean towards using another XML file,
containing a simple sequence of void elements
to provide the software with a ‘map’ of all
the possible maintext
portions to be found in at least one carrier,
and on their sequence. A chunk of this file
could look like this:
<l
xml:id="1.187"></l>
<l
xml:id="1.188"></l>
<l
xml:id="1.188a"></l>
<l
xml:id="1.188b"></l>
<l
xml:id="1.189"></l>
<l
xml:id="1.190"></l>
According to our
conventions, this XML code tells us that there
is one (or more) source(s) having, after line
“1.188”, two lines absent in other sources
(“1.188a” and “1.188b”). But from the point of
view of the computer, the code just says that
a line with id “1.188a”
exists in some manuscript, and that in the
‘abstract’ structure of our maintext (i.e. in
our Alignment-Text) it comes after <l
xml:id="1.188"></l> and
before <l
xml:id="1.188b"></l>.
We could represent the new structure of our model with the following scheme:
As to the
paratext/maintext alignment, a first strategy
to formalize the relation between a gloss and
the portion of the maintext it refers to has
been already discussed above: if, in the
transcription of manuscript a, the element <note
place="supralinear" type="explanatory
glossa"> is a child of an element
<l n="1.190" xml:id="1.190">,
the system will easily deduce that the former
comments on the latter.
The software could be
instructed to store the information about this
link in an XML file (external to the
transcriptions) called, let us say,
paratext(a)1.xml, through the use of one of
the TEI XPointer Schemes, such as XPath1(), as
recommended by the TEI P5 guidelines See http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SA.html#SATSXP.
Let us imagine that
the transcription of manuscript a (file:
transcription_a.xml) includes the following
portion of code (that we already know pretty
well):
<l n="1.200"
xml:id="1.190">Theseus <note
place = "supralinear" type = "explanatory
glossa">rex
Atheniensium</note> […]
rapuit</l>
<l n="1.201"
xml:id="1.191">Aegaeis<note
place = "supralinear" type = "explanatory
glossa">Aegaeus est pater
Thesei</note>
aquis</l>
And the Alignment-Text file A-Txt.xml includes a row reporting the existence of this verse (in the maintext of at least one witness) as follows:
<l
xml:id="1.190"></l>
The software should
generate the following code into the
paratext(a)1.xml file (corresponding to the
‘explanatory glosses’paratextuality level
within source a):
<link evaluate="all"
targets="A-Txt.xml#xpath1(//l[@id='1.190'])
transcription_a.xml#xpath1(//l[@id='1.190']/note[1])"/>
In the preceding case,
we can expect a software to ‘understand’ that
any <note> element child of a
<l> element comments on it, and
create automatically the appropriate code in
the paratext(a)1 file. The consistency of the unique @xml:id
attributes in the Alignment-Text file
A-Txt.xml and in the single
transcription files would be essential
for the software to perform this task,
that is to link a note belonging to a
transcription file to a ‘placeholder’
<l> element belonging to
the Alignment-Text file.
For instance, when a
footnote of a modern print edition (that we
will call source Although different solutions would be
required in more complex cases, for
example when a note refers to a
non-sequential portion of the text.
See http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SA.html#SAPTIP
for a discussion of the possible
options, that could include the use of
<ptr> elements (as
intermediate pointers) as well.c)
comments on a whole poem (and not only on a
verse of it), or – even better – when it
comments to a portion
of the poem (e.g. its introductory section,
from line 1 to 3), the transcriber needs to
use the XML linking markup to create ‘by hand’
an explicit link connecting the
<note> element with all the
elements it comments on (that is with all
<l> elements whose @xml:ids span
from “3.1” to “3.3”). Differently from the
preceding example, the following link is
supposed to be inserted by the transcriber into the transcription
file. In this specific case, the simplest
solution, according to the TEI P5 guidelines,
would be the use of the @target and @targetEnd
attributes in the <note>
element. The following XML code could
therefore be included in the transcription
file for source c (transcription_c.xml):
<l n="1" xml:id="3.1">
[...] </l>
<l n="2" xml:id="3.2">
[...] </l>
<l n="3" xml:id="3.3">
[...] </l>
[...]
<l n="12" xml:id="3.12">
[...] </l>
</div>
<note type="footnote"
xml:id="fnote_3.1-3.3" target="#3.1"
targetEnd "#3.12"> [...]
</note>
When the software parses the transcription file of this source (transcription_c.xml) to store the maintext/paratext linking information into the paratextuality level files, it should transform the preceding code to generate (and write to the appropriate paratext file, let us say paratext(c)2.xml) the following rows, including an intermediate pointer <ptr>, with an @xml:id attribute (in this case "ATxt_3.1_3.2_3.3") automatically generated by the system:
<ptr xml:id="ATxt_3.1_3.2_3.3"
targets="A-Txt.xml#xpath1(//l[@id='3.1'])
A-Txt.xml#xpath1(//l[@id='3.2'])
A-Txt.xml#xpath1(//l[@id='3.3'])">
<link evaluate="all"
targets="#ATxt_3.1_3.2_3.3
transcription_c.xml#xpath1(//note[@id='fnote_3.1-3.3']")
To sum up, the process of editing we have been outlining should include the following phases:
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The transcriber creates the transcriptions of the primary sources
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either confining himself to encode information neutral with regards to the paratextuality levels (not adding to elements such as <note> any @type attribute directly pointing to a precise paratextuality level )
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or appending to any element of the like an ‘interpretive’ @type attribute
In any case, as we saw above, the transcriber must always encode explicitly all information about the linking between text and commentary within a transcription any time that this cannot be ‘deduced’ automatically by the software, like in the case when a single ‘note’ (a gloss, a summary, a little introduction to a whole poem in a poetic collection, a prefatory essay etc.) comments on wider portions of text.
-
-
The editor, working interactively with a specific software:
-
assigns a paratextuality level to any pertinent portion of the transcription
Those processes cannot be completely automatized, because the intervention of the editor will be required for the paratextuality level assignment in the most problematical cases, and, even more, because he must decide in the first place which parts of the transcription are ‘pertinent’. With this term I mean, for example, that within the transcription of a miscellaneous manuscript (or print edition) containing many different literary works, only the part concerning our work must be parsed by the system.
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generates the Alignment-Text by gathering all the xml:ids of the maintext in the transcriptions
-
stores the linking information – necessary for the alignment between the maintext Alignment-Text and the different paratexts – in the appropriate ‘paratextuality level-files’ (like maintext(a), paratext(b)1, paratext(c)2 etc.)
If the Alignment-Text simply works as an ordered sequence of xml:ids, conceived to build up a uniform alignment system, the paratextuality level-files, in their turn, contain simply void elements expressing linking information. In other words, they inform the software about which portions of paratext in each source comment on which portions of maintext.
-
-
From this point on – when the objects constituting the structure of our edition (the Alignment-Text and the ‘paratextuality level-files’) have been generated – the work on the
maintext-files is perfectly analogous to what we would make to use the transcriptions of the primary sources in order to build a digital critical edition. As to theparatexts, the next phase is creating a software (or different modules of the same software) which, working on the objects mentioned above – and in particular on the linking information stored in the paratextuality level-files referring to different paratexts – performs at least presentational solutions to offer the user-
dynamic and customizable access to both the literary work (the maintext) and the various forms of commentary grown around it within its textual tradition (the paratexts), and
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flexible procedures to change the editor’s choices in the ways discussed above, thus making our ‘extended’ digital edition dynamic and interactive enough to realize the main task of a digital scholarly edition: allowing the user, as I said above, to verify and call into question the editor’s work, end eventually to intervene actively in the editorial process.
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