So far we've covered a fair amount of basic encoding that's useful for a fairly wide range of texts

focus so far on the encoding of primary sources in a transcriptional mode: representing the source reading

At this point we're going to spend some time thinking about how we represent the specifically scholarly layer: the added information that expresses editorial activity and information of various kinds.

I have several kinds of information like this in mind; please suggest others

In a sense, this concept of parallelism is the overarching theme here: what scholars do (in a sense) when they work with a text is explore and express its plurality of meaning, of textual possibility this is true whether they are acting as editors or as critics: whether they're preparing a new version of the text for publication, or creating a version for their own interpretive use.

First, some large-scale examples of this kind of parallelism: creating a parallel edition representing a translation

The functional goal in creating these kinds of parallel structures is to be able to let the reader use the parallel texts to make comparisons, see similarities, read the translation against the original, search in one language and get results in the other language, etc.

From the markup standpoint, the essential thing here is to be able to represent the alignment of the two texts, but the question of granularity (of how fine-grained the alignment is) depends on what kinds of functional goals you have

We're not going to cover the mechanisms in detail, because they're complex and tricky, but I want to show you the concept so that if you're thinking about doing this you know the fundamentals of what's involved

Start with showing alignment issues: coarse-grained (text level, stanza level): we can often infer the finer-grained alignment automatically (e.g. in verse where both texts have the same number of lines) fine-grained (line level, potentially below): in cases where more specific alignment is needed specific alignment doesn't scale up; instead, can use out-of-line approach

Explain linking and pointers

There are a number of kinds of local editorial changes that are often made in the process of transcription and editing: processes of regularization and correction that are often done silently and noted in an introduction: correction of typographical errors in the source regularization or modernization of spelling and typography expansion of abbreviations

In print-based editing, these choices are exclusionary: whichever kind of reading you decide to show the reader, its complementary version has to be suppressed (it could be indicated in a note or an appendix but it can't typically be displayed as part of the regular reading surface)

In an XML transcription, however, it's possible to represent both (or in principle multiple) readings in a data structure that shows their parallelism and treats them as alternatives, which can then be chosen (displayed, searched, etc.) when desired.

In TEI, this mechanism is the choice element, which represents a moment of textual forking, where instead of a single reading the text offers a choice of readings

What's at stake here: because the transcription of manuscript materials (and often printed texts as well) involves significant efforts of decipherment and in many cases conjecture or interpretation, and also because primary sources are informationally complex (authorial revision, erasures, missing letters, illegible passages, etc.), a responsible transcription needs to capture not just the end product but also information about the process and the editorial decision-making: not just produce a clean-looking innocent butter-wouldn't-melt-in-its-mouth transcription but preserve information about what was difficult or unclear

conventions for accomplishing this are familiar from print: carets and brackets for marking insertions and deletions, italics to indicate unclear text, footnotes to indicate hypothetical readings or to describe damaged sections

In text markup, the goal is to formalize as much of this information as possible and represent it systematically to classify the reasons for illegibility (where possible), to formalize the rationales for determining whether a given letter is illegible or simply unclear with the goal of making it possible to control the display of the reading surface of the text: to show or hide the deleted words and hypothetical readings, perhaps even to let the reader control the threshold of conjecture at which readings are displayed or hidden ("only show me things you're really certain about")

Next: show basic encoding features: unclear, supplied, gap, add, del

Critical apparatus is a structured expression of a complex textual field in which there are multiple possible readings: either because there are multiple witnesses, or because the nature of the text requires emendation (because of damage, scribal error, etc.)

Showing variant readings, emendations, etc. and organizing them into systems

In markup, the goal is to create a data structure that can express the relationships between the various pieces of information, while also preserving the documentary nature of the text (and allowing other information to be preserved, such as renditional information, genre, syntactic markup, etc.)

In some ways, similar to the choice mechanism: a data structure that represents a set of textual alternatives

The key pieces of information in play: the lemma or the base reading, if your editorial theory includes this concept (it need not: you might not want to express a preference) one or more readings: these might be from other textual witnesses, or from editorial conjecture information about which witness each reading comes from

Critical commentary and annotation at its simplest, can be expressed as prose: in effect, an essay associated with the text; familiar as a note on the text or a critical essay may also express editorial principles or details of the transcription approach (e.g. regularization practices) In a TEI-encoded text, this kind of prose can be treated as metadata: in TEI header (e.g. the notesStmt, the samplingDesc, the editorialDecl)

Commentary can also be made more granular: in the form of notes attached to specific places in the text; this is also a familiar formulation

In TEI, notes like these are encoded using the note element these can be classified: to indicate responsibility, to indicate what kind of note (using any classification system that seems useful: e.g. annotation, correction, hypothesis, context, gloss, etc.)