Textual alterations

todo: Add examples for all forms. Especially difficult ones

Textual alterations

• Addition,
• deletion,
• transposition,
• clarification,
• substitution (should allow for cases like stylisitic rewriting and total rewriting, looser way),
• restoration,
• overwriting,
• immediate/instant correction,
• functional mark (marked as used, printer marks, later scribe marks),
• gap for a planned insertion (which has been filled or not)
• alternatives
• fixation

Here are Hilde Bøe's slides with examples from Henrik Ibsen's manuscripts: http://www.emunch.no/tei-mm-2008/index_ms.html

These categories appear to refer to the graphical form of the text. A distinction should be drawn, however, between the logical editing operations that change the flow of the text, which only include insertion, deletion, substitution and transposition, and their graphical form in manuscripts. For example:

• Clarification is a purely graphical rewriting of the same text. It is really a kind of substitution
• Restoration is the deletion of a crossing-out. This is a case of variation in the markup itself
• Overwriting - another case of substitution, but with a different graphical detail
• Transposition cannot be represented adequately via markup. Since entire blocks of text, or single words, can be transposed across the boundaries of tags, how can this be done without breaking the schema of the XML document? In theory anything, even markup itself, can be transposed e.g. movement of a line-break: word</l><l> into </l><l>word. A mechanism for representing transposition is needed, in addition to some way of recording its visual appearance. See D. Smith Textual Variation and Version Control in the TEI, Computers and the Humanities, 33.1-2 (1999) 103-112, who argues that we need to go 'one level above' the markup to represent transposition or variation in markup.
• Deletion in markup seems simple but is also problematic: how does one represent, for example, the deletion of a paragraph boundary? <del></p><p></del>??? or deletion of underlining on its own without also enclosing the underlined word in a <del> element?
• immediate/instant correction is really a partial version which disturbs the flow: 'I think <del>the...</del> a reason is ...' There is really one original version here that has no continuation in the sentence.

In principle textual variation is outside the text, even if the text contains markup. Any other representation leads to serious shortcomings.