[tei-council] rdg and the phrase

[Daniel O'Donnell]

Just a quick follow up to our conversation re: rdg.  Lous and I have had
a brief correspondence on it since:

> > Hi Lou,
> > 
> > Following up: can you tell me again what it is I should be looking
> at
> > regarding rdg and chunks? Did you say rdgSpan (in which case
> what/where
> > is that?) or is it an attribute? I've quickly gone through the
> chapter
> > again but am not seeing anything that sounds like what I thought you
> > said.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > -dan
> 
> Sorry, I was misremembering something else. addSpan and delSpan are 
> provided by the PH chapter to support additions and deletions of
> items 
> that don't necessarily fit into the document hierarchy, for example
> an 
> additiom that starts at the end of one chapter and continues into the 
> next: I was proposing that something analogous might exist for rdgs
> and 
> lems. But I see we already have it in the shape of the double end
> point 
> attachment method.
> 

The double-endpoint-attachment method is not quite sufficient, however.
It is good for overlapping variants and lemmas of the type in 117 of the
Wife of Bath's Tale (collation units indicated by [ and { respectively):

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

<l xml:id="WBP.117" n="117"> And <anchor xml:id="WBP-A117.1"/> of so
parfit
  <anchor xml:id="WBP-A117.2"/> wys
  <anchor xml:id="WBP-A117.3"/> a wight
  <anchor xml:id="WBP-A117.4"/> ywroght
  <app from="#WBP-A117.1" to="#WBP-A117.3">
   <lem wit="#Hg">of so parfit wys</lem>
   <rdg wit="#Ha4">in what wise was</rdg>
  </app>
  <app from="#WBP-A117.2" to="#WBP-A117.4">
   <lem wit="#Hg">wys a wight</lem>
   <rdg wit="#El #Ha4">was a wight</rdg>
  </app>
 </l>

It won't solve the problem of extra, missing, or reordered chunks (as in
the case of lines of poetry or paragraphs) or divs (as in the case of
diary entries in something like the Diary of Anne Frank), since you
still can't reproduce chunks or divs marked up as such in lem or rdg.
This would work if app and/or lem|rdg was really something like
linkGroup and did not reproduce the actual text, since you could use the
milestones to mark off arbitrary sections of text regardless of their
encoding. But it breaks the moment you try to include the text you mean
with its structural markup in your lem or rdg if this markup is larger
than the phrase.

I'll propose concrete model and language changes this week as promised
at the meeting (in case you didn't hear during the meeting ;Þ ).

-d
-- 
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/