#133 New element = <clarification>?
At "Henrik Ibsen's Writings" we have created a new element to record the clarification phenomenon in manuscripts. Ibsen and his copyists some times clarify words or letters either by writing upon the already written word/letters or by repeating the word/letters offline. We encode these instances of repeating the same for the purpose of clarification, like this:
<clarification hand="HI"
place="inline">Henrik</clarification>
<clarification hand="HI"
place="offline">Henrik</clarification>
We believe this is a well known phenomenon for
manuscript transcribers, and we think it would be a
useful addition to chapter 11 "Representation of Primary Sources".
Please contact Ellen Nessheim Wiger (e.n.wiger@ibsen.uio.no) at
Henrik Ibsen's Writings, if you have any questions or
remarks.
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File Added: clarification.doc
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For some examples in the Ibsen material, see attached document.
File Added: clarification.pdf
Clarifications in Henrik Ibsen's Writings - some examples
File Added: HildeBoe_about_clarifications.pdf
Hilde Bøe's comments
Being a primary source transcriptional feature, I think the best for this element is to be part of the model model.pPart.transcriptional and contain the following classes of attributes:
att.transcriptional, att.editLike, att.placement, att.typed
The semantic of the element, in the way it is requested, is a bit strange as it imply that the text is present twice (the non clear and the clear one), but it is transcribed only once. This model do not encode the unclear reading nor specify in which way it was expunged from the manuscript.
I would think myself that a model like
Sku<del rend="overwritten">l</del><clarification place=”inline”>l</clarification>dren
or perhaps even (baring in mind that I have strong oppositions to <subst> myself, but this is another story):
Sku<subst><del rend="overwritten">l</del><clarification place=”inline”>l</clarification></subst>dren
would fit better. I know that the text is conceptually intended to be present just once, but from a documentary point of view, as a matter of fact it is written twice.
I plan to discuss this issue with Hilde Boe at the next TEI meeting.
The document attached provide plenty of examples that can be used in the Guidelines
Council feels that this distinction is a specific interpretation of phenomena which can be encoded using existing tags (hi or subst in the examples given). While we don't doubt usefulness of this to specific projects, we're not convinced that it's generally useful. Clarification is a specific kind of correction, but there many others. We should however expand discussion in the Guidelines to include examples like this.