[tei-council] Chapter 12 - Critical Apparatus

[Lou's Laptop]

Brett Zamir wrote:
> *General Question:
> *
> Is there any TEI-specific means of providing localizations of a text
> without duplication of tags (and thus chances of markup errors) yet
> also without resorting to entities? 
Not really, if I understqnd the question properly.
> Could <rdg> be used for this? If there is such a mechanism, I think it
> might be helpful to make mention of it here since the topic of
> alternate translations has been raised (albeit in the context of
> witnesses to a text). And would there be a way to indicate a hierarchy
> of base texts, e.g., that one text was translated from Arabic into
> English, and another translation (into say Spanish) was based off of
> the English version, including all of the versions together (or
> linking them by some means)? How about a commentary on a text?
>
You could use this module to indicate alternate translations if they
formed part of a textual tradition, I suppose. Alignment of translations
or addition of commentary is not really the job of this module though --
there are other, simpler, methods of doing that, discussed in the
chaptrer on segmentation and alignment.

> *Introductory section:
> *
> <item> (<label>La</label>) has no item in the same line before it...
>
Ooops. Now added!

> *12.1.2 Readings*
>
> 1) In the following, I don't understand what "abbreviation for per"
> means. If it is about the dropping of those letters, how would this be
> a "loss of the abbreviation" (and what about 'x')?
>
I'm afraid I dont understand your comment. The "abbreviation for per" is
a brevigraph commonly used in medieval mss, and the apparatrus is
suggetsing that the strange reading "eryment" comes about as a result of
thius brevigraph being dropped.

> "In the following apparatus fragment, the reading
> <mentioned>Eryment</mentioned> is tagged as sequential to (derived
> from) the reading <mentioned>Experiment</mentioned>, and the cause is
> given as loss of the *abbreviation for <mentioned>per</mentioned>*.
> <egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples"><app>
> <rdg wit="#La" varSeq="1">*Experiment*</rdg>
> <rdg wit="#Ra2" cause="abbreviation_loss" varSeq="2">*Eryment*</rdg>
> </app></egXML>
>
> 2) For the line "If a manuscript is written in several hands, and it
> is desired to report which hand wrote a particular reading, the
> <att>hand</att> attribute should be used.", is there also a means
> within the header to indicate the default sequence? (e.g. that the
> first reading within an <app> or <rdgGrp> always belonged to hand "m1")
>
No. The order of readings within an <app> or <rdgGrp> is never significant.

> *12.1.3 Indicating Subvariation in Apparatus Entries
> *
> The suggestion of <rdg type='group base'> seems to contradict the
> data.enumerated type which requires an XML name (which doesn't allow
> whitespace).
>
Thanks: this is an error, now fixed.


> *12.1.4.1 Witness Detail Information*
>
> Regarding the line, "Like <gi>note</gi>, <gi>witDetail</gi> can be
> included in the text at the point of attachment, or can point to the
> reading(s) being annotated with its <att>target</att> attribute.", can
> <witDetail> also occur within the header?

As a member of model.noteLike, it is globally available, so yes. Though
I am not sure it would be a good idea to use it there,


>
> *12.1.4.3 The Witness List*
>
> What do prosecutions have to do with TEI? ;)
>
ha ha

> 1) This commented-out line is printed out in the text:
>
> <!-- <witness xml:id="La">British Library Lansdowne 851 </witness>-->
>
Mysterious.

> 2) I'm not too clear on this line: "As the last example shows, the
> *witness description here may complement the short characterisation
> provided with a reference to a full description *of the manuscript
> supplied elsewhere, typically as the content of a <gi>msDesc</gi> or
> <gi>bibl</gi> element." Should this be:
> As the last example shows, in addition to providing a short
> characterisation, the witness description may be complemented with a
> reference to a fuller description..."

OK, that makes more sense. Thanks.

>
> 3) I changed "Constance Group C of mss" to "Constant Group C of mss"
> (since the <head> in the following example states "Constant Group C of
> mss", but I wasn't sure what "mss" was and whether it should be
> capitalized as one instance of "MSS" was later in the chapter, "There
> are no certain instances of this mark as an abbreviation for 'u' in
> these MSS..." (I was also unsure of whether that instance were correct
> or clear to others as well).
>

inconsistency removed

> 4) Should the example starting with "<listWit xml:id="Con">
> <head>Constant Group C</head>", have a <listWit> nested within a
> <listWit> due to the paragraph preceding stating "Such sigla may be
> documented as pseudo-witnesses in their own right by including a
> nested witness list within the witness list"?
>
This is kind of implied, I think. But I've made it clearer in the example.

> *12.2 Linking the Apparatus to the Text
> *
> Is there some means of indicating a type or id of a <variantEncoding/>
> if one could have situations where multiple methods were used or
> multiple locations existed?
>
I dont think this has been thought out completely. You could have
muliple <variantEncoding>s with different ids, and then use the @decls
attribute to indicate which applied to a given part of a text if it were
a member of att.declarable. But it isn't!

> *12.2.1 The Location-referenced Method*
>
> Might XPointer (denoting text ranges, for example) be used with this
> approach to avoid the problems with not being able to offer an
> "unambiguous reconstruction of the lemma"?
>
Yes, xpointer ranges would give a lot more expressivity.

> *12.2.3 The Parallel Segmentation Method*
>
> "Thus, the concepts of a base text and of a lemma become unnecessary".
> Might not <lem> still have its uses as indicating an original text?
>

in this method all texts are "original" in some sense.