• Tutorials
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Examples
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Tests
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Exercises
  • 0. Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
  • 1. Common Structure and Elements
  • 2. The TEI header
  • 3. Prose
  • 4. Poetry
  • 5. Drama
  • 6. Primary Sources
  • 7. Critical Editing
  • 8. Customising TEI, ODD, Roma
• Tools
  • 1. TEI validator
  • 2. XML toolkit
• About

↑dashboard

2. Textual Variation #

Similar to all other TEI modules, the elements and attributes defined in the TEI textcrit module can be used for the encoding of existing source materials (be they in print or digital form), or the encoding of electronic documents from scratch. However, the use of this module in the context of electronic critical editing, adds another perspective to this traditional authorial/editorial angle (see Vanhoutte and Van den Branden 2009). Electronic or digital critical editions can be created from scratch either by encoding different primary source materials straight as a critical edition, or by generating the edition from previously encoded electronic transcriptions of those materials as independent texts in their own right. Therefore, the tags defined in the TEI textcrit module can be used to:

digitise

an existing print edition

create

a digital edition, e.g., by recording some or all of the known variations among different witnesses to the text in a critical apparatus of variants

generate

a digital edition from encoded transcriptions of the documentary source material

In the examples in this TBE module, “critical editing with TEI” will be understood as the act of encoding material sources in a TEI representation that allows for the creation or generation of a digital edition in some form (using any output format in the digital medium, e.g., HTML pages, PDF, flash movies,...), rather than digitising an existing critical edition. In this sense, the authorial/editorial angle of this TBE module differs from that of the other modules (focusing on the digitisation of a material source text in a certain genre). However, the strategies discussed in this tutorial for representing textual variation can equally be applied to the digitisation of existing critical editions. Where there are differences, these will be pointed out explicitly.

For example, consider following texts:

Figure 1. A page of version P2 of the TEI Guidelines.	Figure 2. A page of version P3 of the TEI Guidelines.
Figure 3. A page of version P4 of the TEI Guidelines.	Figure 4. A page of version P5 of the TEI Guidelines.

Some of these images may look more or less familiar to you: they are facsimiles from the first page of chapter 2 of the printed TEI Guidelines throughout their different incarnations, from version P2 (1992) to the latest version, P5 (2009). As you can imagine, the technological evolutions of these 17 years have prompted considerable changes to this chapter that introduces the technological background of text encoding with TEI, ranging from rephrasing, addition or deletion of notes, changes in italicisation, restructuring of paragraphs, etc. One way of approaching this textual variation could consist of encoding these text versions as physically distinct TEI documents, in which corresponding text structures could be aligned by a common identification mechanism. For example, the first couple of paragraphs in these 4 text witnesses could be encoded in different TEI documents as follows:

This would allow for maximal representation of the distinct material sources, and leave the identification of the actual variation either to further processing or human inspection. A variant of this approach could integrate the transcriptions of the text in all material witnesses in a single TEI document, and make use of appropriate linking attributes to point out the alignment between the different text structures. In their naivety, such systems are both redundant and crude. While providing all text of all text witnesses, and aligning the corresponding text structures, they provide little insight in the places where the different witnesses actually differ.

In order to encode the actual textual variation between the different text versions in a meaningful way, the TEI Guidelines provide a specialised module of elements and attributes that allow you to encode textual variation at word level. This TBE tutorial will first discuss how to describe the different text witnesses represented in the critical edition; next deal with the encoding of textual variants between these witnesses in isolation; then treat different ways of integrating such records of variation within the encoding of the critical edition; and finally point out potential problems and pitfalls when creating a critical edition with TEI.

Bibliography

• Vanhoutte, Edward, and Ron Van den Branden. 2009. “Describing, Transcribing, Encoding, and Editing Modern Correspondence Material: a Textbase Approach.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24 (1): 77–98. 10.1093/llc/fqn035.