[tei-council] [Fwd: Re: <note place="foot"/> vs. <note place="bottom"/>]

[Paul F. Schaffner]

On Thu, 19 Mar 2009, Lou Burnard wrote:
> Council members may like to mull over whether or not we should
> reconsider @place="foot"... it is actually used passim in the Guidelines
> source :-(

Just so I'm clear, these are our suggested values, right?

o below (below the line)
o bottom (at the foot of the page)
o margin (in the margin (left, right, or both))
o top (at the top of the page)
o opposite (on the opposite, i.e. facing, page)
o overleaf (on the other side of the leaf)
o above (above the line)
o end (at the end of e.g. chapter or volume.)
o inline (within the body of the text.)
o inspace (in a predefined space)

My questions would be:

-- What exactly is the force of 'suggested'? If it
    is weak, if the values are merely illustrative,
    then I do not suppose it matters much what
    specific terms are suggested.

-- Thinking of the notes I deal with (or avert my
    gaze from) every day, there are many common
    @places not included in this list. Aside from
    foot (and yes, we use 'foot') = at the foot of
    the page; there are notes at the bottom of other
    sub-div units, e.g. notes after each stanza
    of a poem, or after each paragraph; shoulder
    notes; mixed notes that begin as interlinears
    and spread down the margin to the foot of the
    page and then spread across the page; notes
    placed opposite the text in what amounts to
    another column of the same table; notes at the
    end of the div, or of the superordinate div, or
    of the volume, or the book; notes above the word
    (as opposed to above the line); etc. Given their
    infinite variety, how much should we worry
    about suggesting a few values anyway?

-- Does we make any specific recommendations for
    distinguishing between multiple note series
    in the same general location? In the example
    from the Dunciad, the tagger  distinguished the two sets
    of footnotes using @type, but is that generalizable?
    I shouldn't think so; the example might even be
    misleading in that regard. What does one do when
    the two series are of essentially the same @type
    (e.g. 'textual') but nevertheless of distinct series?

    (TCP uses numbers affixed to the @place value, e.g.
    place="foot1" vs. place="foot2" to distinguish series;
    this is of course a kludge, like most of what we do!).

-- Do we make any specific recommendations for
    distinguishing between note series based on
    the character or rendering of their markers?
    E.g., an alphabetical series of notes alongside
    a numeric series vs. an asterisk-flagged series,
    all in the margin, like in the 1602 Geneva Bible.

-- Do we make any provision for recording the 'running'
    labels associated with marginal or foot notes.
    (Again as in the Dunciad example, which uses @type,
    or frequently found at the head of the margin
    on every page). Is this an <fw> or something
    else? (We tend to 'distribute' such labels,
    rather unhappily, into each note in the series
    as a <label>: <note place="margin" n="2"><label>
    Comments.</label> ... </note>).

-- Finally, do we make any specific recommendations
    for distinguishing more finely between the suggested
    place values listed? e.g. books that have different
    sets of notes in the inner and outer margins (or
    the left and right margins).

There are probably answers to some of these lurking somewhere
in the documentation, but I suppose my feeling (eager
as always to be corrected) is that there are so many
potential complications to the placement of notes, that
most people dealing with historical materials will have
to contrive their own customized set of values in any case.

pfs
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Paul Schaffner | PFSchaffner at umich.edu | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/
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