[tei-council] Suppressed text: summary of position (FR 2242434)

[Elena Pierazzo]

Just a little clarification: Gabby and myself volunteered to provide 
some examples for the feature during the last council conf-call, and his 
message is the result of our discussion.

I know Sebastian said that tomorrow (today) was the last possible day to 
include new stuff for the next release, but I feared we arrived a bit 
last-moment, especially because we are actually reopening the games for 
the element name (see the message at the very bottom). If we missed the 
deadline, we apologise...

Elena

Gabriel Bodard wrote:
> See 
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2242434&group_id=106328&atid=644065
>
> The request is for an element to indicate text that the editor wants to 
> mark as superfluous in the source text. It is perhaps unhelpful to 
> compare this to "supplied", since it is a different kind of editorial 
> intervention. (Supplied text is restored by the editor to indicate 
> damage, error, or some other cause of omission of original text--it is 
> relatively agnostic as to why the text was lost/omitted.)
>
> In my field, this criterion of editorial markup is clearly recognised: 
> the Leiden Conventions use curly braces to represent this phenomenon 
> ("litterae errore adiectae quas editor expunxit", e.g. dedika{ra}runt 
> [citing Panciera 1980]). Currently EpiDoc--which aims to match Leiden 
> concepts 1-to-1 with TEI patterns, recommends the use of "sic" for this 
> distinction (see 
> http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/dev/erroneousinclusion.html which is 
> somewhat out of date in general but current for this purpose).
>
> Elena supplies a different kind of example:
> <l n="4">a darmi morte, poi m'avete preso <omit>a tradimento</omit></l>
> <l n='5'>sì com' l'uccellator prende l'uccello</l>
> <gap/>
> <l n="43">e lettere dintorno che diriano <omit>in questa guisa</omit></l>
> <l n="44">Più v'amo, dëa, che non faccio Deo</l>
>
> Where the text marked here with "omit" is identified by the editor 
> (Contini 1960) as interpolated and doesn't fit in the meter; it is 
> marked in the printed text with a smaller font. This is a clear case 
> where "sic" is not appropriate, since it is not athetized by the editor 
> because of scribal error, but for another reason. Nevertheless, it seems 
> preferable to mark these two things with the same element.
>
> "Sic" alone is not unambiguous, despite the EpiDoc recommendation cited 
> above:
>
> Eleph<sic>eph</sic>ant
> or
> Eleph<choice><sic>eph</sic><corr/></choice>ant
>
> could mean either that the second "eph" is (a) included in error, and 
> marked as superfluous by the editor, or (b) is marked by the editor as 
> an error, but with no statement as to what the correct form should be. 
> This situation could in theory be solved with an attribute (which 
> wouldn't solve the case with interpolated verses), or a new element 
> (which would). My recommendation is for the latter.
>
> A final comment/recommendation re the element name: this is not a "gap" 
> (which marks text missing from the edition, and therefore is empty 
> element), but rather an editorial intervention marking text as 
> superfluous. I don't much like the name "omit", despite its claimed 
> parallelism with "supplied", since it seems to be a processing 
> instruction rather than a description of what is in the text. (As noted 
> above, "supplied" is a description of how this text gets into the 
> edition when it is not in the source text. Our superfluous text may not 
> be omitted--as in the verse example above in a smaller font, or the 
> Leiden example in curly braces.) I would prefer something with the 
> semantics of "superfluous", rather than "omit", "suppress", 
> "expunxit"/"expunged" or the like. Might <superfl> be a bit less of an 
> eyeful?
>
> Notes:
> Panciera 1980 = Hans Krummrey & Silvio Panciera, 'Criteri di edizione e 
> segni diacritici', Tituli 2 (1980), 205-215.
> Contini 1960 = Poeti del Duecento, ed. Gianfraco Contini. 
> Milano-Napoli:Ricciardi I, 155-64.
>
>
>   

-- 
Dr Elena Pierazzo
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Phone: 0207-848-1949
Fax: 0207-848-2980
elena.pierazzo at kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk