#531 New element for secluded text
It's not uncommon for editors of texts with a history of manual copying to identify portions of the text that were interpolated, that is, added by scribes rather than by the original author. The <add> element and the <surplus> element pretty much cover most of this territory. There's a subcategory of interpolated text that covers text the editor believes was written by the author, but which doesn't belong where it's currently located. If the editor can locate the original place, then a combination of <surplus> and <supplied> or something similar can be used to relocate the text. But there's a final, missing subcategory, and that is text which the editor thinks is genuine, but which should be relocated they know not where. In editions, this kind of text is usually bracketed and marked by a note in the apparatus.
I'm proposing a new element <secl> (for 'secluded') to cover this type of text, with a content model like <supplied>, for marking text which is genuine, but unable to be correctly placed.
I've been thinking about whether
<surplus>would work for this, but I don't think it would without some redefinition.<surplus>is for marking text that doesn't belong; secluded text belongs, but isn't in the right place (and we can't just move it because we don't know where to put it).Hi Hugh. I've thought about this for a few minutes and keep coming back to one initial problem: namely why isn't this just an 'add' element? The only thing that distinguishes it is that you don't know where to put it. But you have to put the 'secl' element somewhere in any case. Usually one puts an 'add' element where you think it is anchored, and then with @place record where it was physically on the page. With 'secl' you'll still need to place it somewhere in the XML hierarchy and I'm concerned that if you don't know where this goes that you'll have to put it somewhere and still record where it was on the physical page. So if we have a nice long 'p' element instead of putting an 'add' part way through to indicate it refers to this location, we might put it at the end and record through an attribute that it is not specifically anchored. We'd still record where on the page it appeared. It seems to me this is a structurally-unanchored 'add' element but not necessarily a semantically different category. It is the modern editor having a problem placing it, and this should be recorded, but to me doesn't really change the nature of the original addition. There is also the question, if this is structurally-unanchored, that it might need to be able to appear in places that 'add' cannot. It might need to be between paragraphs, for example, rather than just at phrase level. To me 'supplied' is not a relevant comparison as that is next added by the modern editor or transcriber not the author or scribe.
Happy to be convinced otherwise though: maybe we need some examples to look at?
Thanks for your thoughts, James. In my mind, 'add' marks an insertion, i.e. text in a particular document that you can see someone has added after the original words were written. It’s the counterpart to 'del'. so that doesn’t quite work. Secluded text might be left where it appears in the witnesses, or it might be relocated to the end of the poem or book (depending on the type of work) or even to an appendix. This is something that might appear in a 'rdg' too, as the opinion of a previous editor. The example I’m looking at is lines 15-16 of Propertius 1.15 (the 2007 OCT edition). Here’s the note in the apparatus:
15-16 secl. Pescani; post 20 Markland, post 22 Lachmann
Meaning "Pescani thought these lines don’t belong here and couldn’t locate them; Markland put them after line 20, Lachmann after line 22". Heyworth, the editor of the text, places the lines at the end of the poem, and brackets them to show that he doesn’t think they are Propertian, so the lemma would probably contain a 'surplus', but Pescani’s 'rdg' would have 'secl'.
The point is not that 'secl' would take its contents out of the text flow—the editor has to put it somewhere—but that it is marked as not belonging where it’s put.
I was being lazy in comparing it to 'supplied', but I do think they’d occur in similar contexts and have similar kinds of content.
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Feature Requests:
#531Thanks. That actually helps me understand it a lot more. I think this needs a lot more discussion to scope it out, but I do now think I understand how it is different from 'add'. (I think sometimes something being an 'add' might be precisely contemporaneous but, for example, added outside the regular text flow. So telling that case of 'add' and this proposed element apart is some we will have to be clear about.)
Council sub-group thinks this is probably a good idea, but would like to see it fleshed out a bit better. We're asking the OP (who happens to be Council Chair) to create a customization ODD with a new
<secluded>element, with a good example in the<exemplum>.Implemented with [r13316] – [r13319]
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Commit: [r13316]
Commit: [r13319]