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This panel addresses the TEI critical apparatus as a data model, investigating how it has expanded the capacity of scholarly editions to articulate and analyze phenomena of textual variation and multiplicity. We will discuss how the TEI critical apparatus, as a structure that mediates distinct versions of a work, is expanding horizons for multidimensional and pluralistic document modeling. Our panel surveys recent experiments with the critical apparatus that have led to new kinds of scholarly research and in some cases to revisions to the TEI Guidelines. What kinds of research questions and applications can we support with the TEI critical apparatus, and what practical challenges do we face in working with it in inline and stand-off ways?
We begin by investigating how the TEI critical apparatus has transformed the
expressive capacity of scholarly editions to prioritize textual multiplicity. We
continue by sharing data models that apply TEI critical apparatus as a stand-off
spine
for connecting independently encoded witnesses. We conclude by
inviting the audience to discuss with us the scalability of these methods for texts
with large numbers of witnesses, and the technological challenges and opportunities
of stand-off methods in light of recent changes to the TEI Guidelines.
A critical apparatus in a printed scholarly edition is the set of notes made by an
editor in support of their presentation of a text. The TEI Guidelines’ Critical
Apparatus module builds on the notion of the critical apparatus in print to do
something different and more powerful—to actually model textual variation rather than
simply note where it occurs. Textual variation and its expression is particularly
complex. Texts can vary along a number of axes: an editor may be faced with a work
that has a number of similar versions, so that it may be possible to infer an
original text; more significant variation may happen, so that while a single
work
is identifiable, no single text exemplifies that work; several
differing stages in the development of a final edition may be extant; a single
document may have multiple, differing editions. There are also different philosophies
of edition-making that vary across discipline and document type. This presentation
will set the stage for the panel by defining the intellectual space occupied by
different types of Digital Scholarly Edition and providing examples of the ways
different kinds of DSEs are realized. A number of these efforts are predicated on the
idea that the critical apparatus is obsolete. What then does that mean for the
Critical Apparatus module?
This and the following paper are related, based on the development of a stand-off
spine
for variorum editions. Working on the Frankenstein Variorum
project, we designed a model that we call a spine
as a backbone
or
binding
, designed to prioritize the reading of changes to a work over time
rather than to marginalize such reading in the tradition of the print apparatus. The
spine
begins as the edited output of machine-assisted collation, and is
transformed into a stand-off document containing pointers and data about variant
passages. It is used to generate reading views of each edition that can either:
In the first case, the apparatus can construct new TEI editions, locating
moments of alteration based on alignment information stored in the spine
. In
the second, the apparatus alone is needed to connect with existing editions. Through
the spine
we can pull something as complex as TEI page-by-page manuscript
encoding—without altering it—into a new web interface that points out where the
manuscript semantically aligns with and varies from the printed editions. Thanks to
the document model of our spine
we produce from collation data a lightweight
and readily updatable mechanism to bring multiple kinds of editions into comparative
view.
The spine
collation described in the previous paper relies on stand-off markup
techniques and pointers in order to represent variance across a number of sources. In
building a web based publication out of this structure, the code will need to follow
these pointers to locate, collect, and publish these resources through an interactive
website. This would be quite a challenge with traditional transformations of TEI data
to HTML structures, because the pointers would need to be reinterpreted to locate
data in the HTML surrogate. CETEIcean, a tool for rendering TEI directly in the
browser, creates an isomorphic representation of a TEI document as HTML Custom
Elements. This direct correspondence between the TEI data and its surrogate makes it
easier to follow pointers from the spine
collation and build interactive
publications. This presentation will introduce the Early Modern Songscapes project,
in which this approach has been tested for both text and music notation. It is
possible to apply this approach to music notation data because the Music Encoding
Initiative format (MEI) provides structures equivalent to the TEI critical apparatus
and the tool Verovio generates an isomorphic SVG representation of MEI data to be
published as an interactive score in the browser.
In the final contribution James Cummings will respond to the previous three panelists’ presentations, by reflecting on their views of the TEI critical apparatus markup as a data model that both expresses interpretations of multi-witness texts and creates structures for comparative analysis. He will respond to the practical challenges the previous panelists have described with open-ended questions designed to lead into discussion with the audience. He will call attention to the difficulties and lack of technological support for individual projects using TEI critical apparatus markup through stand-off or out-of-line methodologies. He will question how scalable these solutions might prove to be for those working with traditions that involve a significant number of witnesses, or whether there may be similarly progressive workflows for encoding copy-specific apparatus for large witness groups. Part of the response will highlight for the audience some of the more recent modifications to the TEI Guidelines in this area, for example the move from allowing just phrase-level content in <rdg> elements to larger structures such as <div> and <floatingText>, and the additional challenges this may introduce. In doing so, this response will question where TEI critical apparatus markup might develop in the future.