Re: Critical editions with ConTeXt

["Pablo Rodríguez" <oinos@web.de>]

On 20/07/12 20:21, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
> [...]
> And to explain that a bit: it's not merely "ugly." If all you want is 
> the printed book, you don't care about the ugliness and simply code this 
> way to get the desired output. However, we are in the 21st century. We 
> should be beyond the point where a critical edition is the printed text, 
> we should think of the typeset result as just one way of representing 
> the logical structure of the edition. With a syntax as the one Wolfgang 
> shows above, it is difficult for most parsers to understand what is 
> meant. Which means most ways of representing such a structure will fail 
> because it's not a consistent logical construct. And yes, as Pablo 
> pointed out, TEI itself hasn't reached a clear conclusion on such 
> points, and they are specialists who have been working on these problems 
> for quite a while...

Thomas, many thanks for your reply.

You are the real expert on this topic. I don't really know why there are
so many people from TEI working on textual variants, but my guess is
that this might be also related to the different needs each of them
might face for each kind of texts. Probably the needs to critically edit
an ancient Greek or Latin author might differ with the ones for an early
modern (or even contemporary) English or German author.

There is another issue that I would like to discuss. My question is what
changes in a critical edition with no page model. I don't mean that
critical editions need to be printed (it isn't a paper-based model), but
I'm not so sure they can be properly represented without a page model.
So, if I'm not wrong, it isn't only a question of data representation,
but it is related to the logic of the text structure itself.

Some have characterized the electronic text as infinite, in opposition
to a page-based text that by definition finite. XML is a good example of
a human-readable text, but this human-readability is relevant because of
a prior machine-readability. XML is meaningful and useful for non-coders
as source code to generate a human-understandable representation of text.

Footnotes can be displayed not using a page model, because reference is
on both the body and the note texts. A hyperlink is the right way to
link each other. So, an infinite text is not a problem. The footnote
doesn't need to be on the same page (as in a printed book), because
there is a way to go to the note and back to the text (as on the
physical book).

But linenotes are different. The reference is on the note, but not on
the body. The same line can have many linenotes. And the same word or
passage can be referenced in more than one apparatus simultaneously.
Linenotes work on a page model, because all relevant information is
given at a glance. Looking at a page, one knows which words of text
passages have relevant information on the apparatus(es). Using the model
of the infinite text, there are some issues, unless one reconstructs the
page model on a screen model (I mean, that each portion of body text
displayed in the screen has also the apparatus(es) included on that same
screen). These issues are: which words or text passages have additional
information, how to distinguish between references to different
apparatuses and how to access to each of these different apparatuses.
Maybe marking the text with different features might be a way to
distinguish them (colors, underline or a mixture of both). And enabling
contextual information is the way to workaround these issues. But I
wonder how this is really helpful in practice.

Sorry, but I'm afraid I'm a bit skeptical about this. Probably I'm
wrong, but I think it will take some time before having an ePub file
containing the electronic version of a critical edition.

Just in case it might help,


Pablo
-- 
http://www.ousia.tk


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