[tei-council] notes on TC Critical apparatus

Mon Sep 24 18:33:09 EDT 2007

Arianna Ciula wrote: (ages ago)
> Dear council,
>
> I have read the Critical Apparatus chapter, edited the minimal 
> straight forward mistakes in the prose and send it back to the editors.
Syd checked in this version but didnt act on these comments: I have now 
processed them as follows:
>
> These are just my additional notes for things that could be changed, 
> but that I haven't done:
>
> - "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’ — it is 
> not to be confused with ‘the heading of an entry in a reference book, 
> especially a dictionary, nor with ‘a subsidiary proposition introduced 
> in the proof of some other proposition; a helping theorem.’"
>
> I would also add:
> "...it is not to be confused with ‘the heading of an entry in a 
> reference book, especially a dictionary,’ *nor with ‘the word's 
> lemma’*, nor with ‘a subsidiary proposition ..."
>

Agreed. I have revised the text as follows:

"N.B. the term <term>lemma</term> is used here in the text-critical
sense of <q>the reading accepted as that of the original or of the
base text</q>. This sense differs from that in which the word is used
elsewhere in the Guidelines, for example as in the attribute
<att>lemma</att> where the intended sense is <q>the root form of
an inflected word</q>, or  <q>the heading
of an entry in a reference book, especially a dictionary,</q>."
I deleted the reference to the other (mathematical) sense.

> - I am not sure why the <witDetail> element has att.placement. Its 
> purpose isn't to encode the information about a witness as recorded in 
> the source (therefore least of all where in the source), is it? or am 
> I missing something?
>
<witDetail> is, it says here, a specialised form of <note>, so it is not 
implausible for it to have more or less the same attributes as <note>.  
Probably there should be some class from which both elements inherit the 
attributes they share.  I cannot imagine why you'd want to specify the 
placement of a witDetail note when transcribing a critical apparatus, 
but that's what it is for.

> - the attribute @with has as data type 'data.pointer' when within the 
> class att.textCritical or att.rdgPart, but has data type 'data.code' 
> when it is used as attribute of <witDetail>. I can see a possible 
> reason for this, but I thought I pointed it out if we are aiming to 
> get rid of these inconsistencies as much as possible.
>
A palpable error. It should be data.pointer everywhere: I have changed  
witDetail accordingly. Though I begin to think witDetail is a really 
stupid idea.

> - "Of course, the sigla used for different witnesses need not be the 
> same in the source and the wit attribute, as shown particularly in the 
> apparatus for the second line of the poem (Diet.1.2)."
>
> Do we mean here: "Of course, the sigla used for different witnesses 
> need not be the same in the *<wit> element* and the @wit attribute, as 
> shown particularly in the apparatus for the second line of the poem 
> (Diet.1.2)."?
>

Yes we do. I have reworded this as
"Of course, the siglum used for a particular witness in the
source, as recorded in the <gi>wit</gi> element, may well differ from
that used to indicated the same witness in  the <att>wit</att> 
attribute, as shown particularly in..."

> - "For examples of this element, see the following sections. The 
> formal declaration is given in section 2.3.3 The Editorial Practices 
> Declaration."
>
> Shouldn't this point to 2.3.9 The Variant-Encoding Method Element?
>
Gosh, yes. Fixed.

> - "<!-- <teiHeader> --> <variantEncoding method="double-end-point" 
> location="external"/>
> <!-- </teiHeader> ... <body> -->"
>
> This is the only example where the <variantEncoding> is commented out.

Eh? It isn't commented out -- only the teiHeader tags round it are. I 
agree that the presentation should be consistent though, and have made 
them all look the same.

> - " <app from="#WBP.1" to="#WBP-A2">
>   <lem wit="#El #Hg">Experience</lem>
>   <rdg wit="#La">Experiment</rdg>
>   <rdg wit="#Ra2">Eryment</rdg>
>  </app>"
>
> If this example is still referring to the internal location of the 
> apparatus and it is only an alternative to the example above, I don't 
> understand why is using the @to attribute to point to an anchor in the 
> text.
>
My understanding is that the @from and @to attributes specify the span 
of text to which the apparatus relates. This is usually co-extensive 
with the lemma, as in this example, thus indeed making the use of the 
@to appear redundant. But as the prose goes on to point out, the 
advantage of this redundancy is that you can represent overlapping 
lemmata for the same span.

> - the example with <expan> should be substituted with <ex> now, 
> shouldn't it?
>

Yup. done. Actually this example really is an awful one: I am tempted to 
remove it completely. I commented out a lot of redundant waffle 
following it instead.  I would like to remove the last para of the 
chapter too, but have forborn doing so.