[tei-council] Choice and App/rdg again

[Dan O'Donnell]

Hi all,

Since we are thinking about content models, let me re-raise the issue
with choice and app/rdg: my view is that the current phrase-level model
is two restrictive.

Choice is an obvious one: simultaneity is a logical concept not a point
in a document hierarchy, there is no reason why one cannot have points
in texts in which one is to choose between alternative content or
sequences of marked up text at the level of the paragraph, division, or,
as I pointed out in the case of the Dictionary of the Khazars (which has
male and female versions), entire texts.

rdg within app is perhaps less obvious as we tend to think of readings
as lists of words in collations. But once again it is not difficult to
think of use cases in which units larger than the phrase might be
collated: we had an example on tei-l when somebody was asking about
additions or omissions of lines in two versions of a poem; different
versions of a text might have entire additional chapters (the Diary of
Anne Frank springs to mind), and authors can change, add, or suppress
paragraphs: a use case of the latter is Edward Van Houtte's SGML edition
of Teleurgang van het Waterhoek, which is collated by paragraph.

Traditionally apparatus have not handled units-larger than the phrase
very well. In Dobbie's 1942 edition of Caedmon's Hymn, the apparatus
prints an additional line found in two witnesses but doesn't indicate
that the distinction is that there is an additional metrical unit, not
simple some more words. In the critical edition of Het Achterhuis (the
Diary of Anne Frank), the do the collation as a quasi-parallel text:
when text is missing in one version or the other they put in dots; if it
has been moved they reproduce it twice once where it appears in the
particular witness and once in square brackets where it appears in the
base text.

The TEI apparatus model is much more flexible than its print
predecessor: in both Waterhoek and Achterhuis, the text could have been
encoded as a series of apparatus entries without a base text the way we
suggest in the guidelines... except that rdg can't contain <p> or <div>
and hence neither Edward nor our mythical encoder of the Critical
Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank can't indicate that they are
collating paragraphs and/or diary entries.

I raised this earlier and discussion petered out. I'm pretty worried
about the current model however. I have seen quite a number of
discussions over the years that suggest to me that people run into
unreasonable limitations of the models very quickly.

-dan
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/