Choice and RDG content model (Re: rend= not global? (was "Re: Fwd: [tei-council] DRAFT Agenda for ..."))

[Daniel O'Donnell]

Since we are raising this kind of thing, let me ask one too:

Should we not seriously consider changing the content model of choice
and of rdg (which is a related issue) to something similar to that for
floating text? Currently both can contain only phrase level and global
elements.

There are two reasons for this:

1) choice is a logical relationship rather than a natural part of the
document hierarchy. That is to say, the function that choice
performs--grouping alternate or encodings (I would say alternate or
simultaneous text orencodings)--is not something that logically must
occur at a given point in a document hierarchy. I can have paragraphs or
even divs that are alternates for each other (e.g. prose and verse
translations of Boethian metra spring to mind), there is no reason why I
could not have alternates for entire texts (the Dictionary of the
Khazars [sp?] comes in male and female versions).

2) rdg is a child of app which is a specialised version of choice (as we
say in the element definition. In a recent discussion on tei-l, we had a
question about encoding variants where one witness has an extra line (or
is missing one). This is quite a common case, even though our current
definition of rdg does not allow you to indicate that one or more of the
collated rdg's consists of more than one line.

Some use cases: Edward van Houtte's Electronic Teleurgang van het
Waterhoek collates witnesses on a paragraph by paragraph basis. My
Caedmon's Hymn has some witnesses that are missing lines at some points
and have extra lines at others. In the Anglo-Saxon poetic records, some
variants involve variation in the order of lines.

This is not something that print apparatus have handled very well in the
past--Dobbie's edition of Caedmon's Hymn just prints the additional
lines but doesn't indicate that the variants involve the addition of a
metrical line. But we can do better. The information is useful and ought
to be encoded.

What say all ye merry councilors?

-dan

On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 15:28 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> James Cummings wrote:
> >
> > If there was a good way to have an
> > att.global-for-everything-under-text which elements only got when they were
> > used as a descendant of <text>, then that would be fine.  (i.e. <p> in the
> > header didn't have @rend but <p> inside a <div> inside <text> did.)
> er, thanks but no thanks. implementing that is a project
> for the future....
> 
> 
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Department Chair and Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox +1 403 329-2377
Fax +1 403 382-7191
Email: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
WWW: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/