Abstract
This paper chronicles the work of the TEI textual criticism working groups through several phases, documenting how and why the design goals were shaped by the requirements of several distinct user communities and by the nature of the textual evidence itself. Encoding schemes for the representation of physical details of textual witnesses were unified with encoding schemes for critical editing practices when it was observed that the two phenomena were inextricably layered and linked within real texts. Rationale is offered for the development teams' adherence to exceedingly general design principles: (a) the requirement that the encoding notations be neutral in text-theoretic terms; (b) the need to accommodate dramatically different text-transmission phenomena and research goals within diverse text-critical arenas; (c) the need for commensurability of the text-critical markup with encoding notations used in closely related text-analytic research. The paper also assesses the results of the effort in terms of the encoding scheme's adequacy for several scholarly purposes: suggestions are made concerning the need for programmatic testing, for refinement, and for extension of the encoding model to support a broader range of text-transmission phenomena and research objectives.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Gabler, H.W.Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Garland: New York and London, 1984.
Goldfarb, Charles F.The SGML Handbook. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Greetham, D. C.Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland: New York and London, 1992.
Hockey, S.A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities. London: Duckworth, 1980.
Kane, G.Piers Plowman, The A Version. Revised Edition. London: Athlone, 1988.
La pratique des ordinateurs dans la critique des textes. Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, n. 579 (Paris, 29–31 mars 1978). Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1979.
Lancashire, I., and W. McCarty.The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1988. Clarendon: Oxford, 1988.
Lancashire, I.The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989–90. Clarendon: Oxford, 1991.
Lee, A. “Numerical Taxonomy Revisited: John Griffith, Cladistic Analysis and St. Augustine's Quaestiones in Heptateuchum”.Studia Patristica, 20 (1989).
Metzger, B.M.The Text of the New Testament. Second Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.
Microsoft Product Support Services. “Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification”. Application Note GC0165, June 1992.
Oakman, R.L.Computer Methods for Literary Research. Columbia: University of Southern Carolina, 1980.
Pierce, R.H. “Multivariate Numerical Techniques Applied to the Study of Manuscript Traditions”. InTekst Kritisk Teori og Praksis. Ed. B. Fidjestolet al. Oslo: Novus Forlag, 1988, pp. 24–45.
Reynolds, L.D., and N.G. Wilson.Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Third Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Robinson, P.M.W. and R.J. O'Hara. “Report on the Textual Criticism Challenge 1991”.Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 3, 4 (1992), 331–37.
Robinson, P.M.W. and R.J. O'Hara. “Computer-Assisted Stemmatic Analysis”. InThe Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers Volume I. Ed. N. Blake and P. Robinson. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993.
Robinson, P.M.W.The Transcription of Primary Textual Sources Using SGML. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1994.
Shillingsburg, P.L.Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1986.
Skehan, P.W., E. Ulrich and J.E. Sanderson, eds.Qumran Cave 4, IV. Paleo-Hebrew and Greek Biblical Manuscripts. Discoveries in the Judean Desert, IX. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. and L. Burnard.Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of Machine-Readable Texts Draft Version 1.0 (TEI P1). Chicago and Oxford: The Text Encoding Initiative, 1991.
Warnock, John E. “The New Age of Documents”.Byte, 17, 6 (1992), 257–60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Robin Cover serves as humanities computing technical consultant for the CELLAR Project (Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological Research), sponsored by SIL's Department of Academic Computing. His research involves conceptual modelling and functional design specification for a multilingual object-oriented document processing system and integrated bibliographic database management subsystem.
Peter Robinson is Executive Officer for theCanterbury Tales Project, was chair of the TEI work-group on textual criticism, and is developer of the computer programCollate, widely used in the preparation of critical editions based on multiple witnesses. He acts as consultant to several publishers and critical edition projects.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cover, R.C., Robinson, P.M.W. Encoding textual criticism. Comput Hum 29, 123–136 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830706
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830706