Guidelines

Here we collect some practical guidelines agreed for the VEdition project.

The team choices are:

  • adopt a symbolic (feature-based) rather than graphic (SVG-based) representation for diplomatic visuals. While the two types of representation are not mutually exclusive, purely economical considerations forced the team to opt for the more economical solution. So, rather than literally drawing visuals on top of a facsimile, we are assigning a number of typological features to each operation, like shape (e.g. horizontal stroke, vertical stroke, diagonal stroke, etc.), color (e.g. black ink, orange ink, etc.), position (e.g. interlinear above, interlinear below, baseline above, etc.), and so forth. These will be defined in taxonomies used by the Cadmus-based editor for snapshots.

  • adopt a diplomatic-first definition of operations, meaning that wherever there is a choice between a purely logical, text-focused representation of an edit and a diplomatic-based one aimed at representing all the visual counterparts of the edit, the latter is to be preferred.

The second choice can be formalized with these two complementary principles:

(P1) respect diplomatic features. When what could be envisaged as a single operation has different visual parts, rather split this into multiple operations, assigning diplomatic features accordingly.

(P2) do as much as possible with the minimum number of operations. This principle comes second, so if it conflicts with P1, P1 wins.

Let us make an example: say we have an epigram where the word Wägen is changed to its singular form Wägt. From a text-focused point of view, we could just represent it as a word replacement: replace Wägen with Wägt.

Note that one could also replace en with t to get the same result; but replacing the whole word would probably be functionally better in terms of the potential usages of this information. For instance, say that for searching or filtering purposes we are going to extract in a list all the operations from the texts:

  • if we replaced Wägen with Wägt, this list entry would include these two words.
  • if instead we replaced en with t, this list entry would include en and t, which are clueless when extracted from their context. This is why in a text-focused perspective we would prefer the whole-word scope for the replace, even if both replacements will of course output the same text.

Anyway, let us say that on the sheet we see these signs:

  • a t overwritten on e with orange ink.
  • a vertical stroke on the final n with orange ink.

Now, here we have two different visuals (a letter and a vertical stroke) for different aspects of what according to P2 we would consider as a single replace operation. So, here P2 is in conflict with P1; which means that P1 wins over P2. So, rather than a single replace operation, we would have two operations:

  1. replace e with t. Diplomatic features would tell us that this is overwritten with orange ink.
  2. delete n. Diplomatic features would tell us that this is represented by a vertical stroke with orange ink.

This of course reflects in greater detail what we have on our sheet: the writing process was right a “patch” of the existing word to transform it from its plural to its singular form, and this happened with two operations: overwrite e, and delete n.

So, P1 here wins over P2, and we prefer 2 operations rather than a one. Given that both operations are logically connected, we can assign both to the same group by giving them the same group ID. Group IDs are arbitrarily chosen strings one can assign to any number of operations within the same snapshot to say that they are logically connected. Such IDs by convention should include only lowercase letters without diacritics, dashes, and digits, and typically provide some human-friendly clue about their meaning.

Thus, we could assign a group ID like waegt to both the operations (replace and delete). This would connect them together, while still preserving the preference for P1 over P2.