My current project, the Latin text of the “Life of St Botolph”, composed around 1100, has reached us in a number of manuscripts, together with abbreviated forms, also in manuscripts, and a couple of early editions. These are the “witnesses” to the text.
I have now compared the lot, and I have a word document with all the variations. There are indeed differences in words, mostly accidental. Only one of these affects the sense, where some idiot copyist in a single late manuscript decided that the people living nearby were Scottish, and introduced the word into the text. It’s usually fairly obvious what the correct reading is. It’s fairly straightforward to produce a stemma, a tree-diagram showing what is copied from what, based on those errors and omissions. This I have done.
But what to put in the notes? There are about a dozen witnesses. This means that it is possible to put the whole list of variants into the notes. That’s not going to be very readable, tho. The jargon for this is a “positive apparatus.”
Or I could just ignore every manuscript except where it differs from what I have decided the text is. That will be much shorter. But it will also be a lot less usable. The jargon for this is a “negative apparatus.” One manuscript came to hand late, and I can tell you that it helped a *lot* that I knew what every manuscript said, rather just what was different.
Indeed a critical apparatus is not a very readable thing anyway. So how best to do it?
There are papers on these kinds of questions. Addressed these issues very well indeed was Sebastien Moureau, “The apparatus criticus” (2015), looking at how to do the apparatus for an Ethiopian text.1 The article is online and recommended. This assesses the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches.
In particular Moureau points out that the long-established format of classical editions – numbering the lines of the page, with variants by line number at the page foot – is completely impossible to reproduce with any widely-used software. Here’s a random page from a recent edition of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, vol. 3:
How on earth do we do that in Word?
Now there is an online course with textbook, M Burghart, Digital Editing of Medieval Texts: A Textbook, online here. Chapter 4 discusses how to encode the variants in something called TEI. This is a computer file format. It’s horrible.
TEI is no doubt possible to learn, but working with tagged text files is horrible. It imposes a huge initial cost on anyone wishing to adopt this approach. It’s very error-prone.
However this does introduce an interesting general issue.
Basically in order to do a critical edition, you must need to go through two stages.
- Compile a database, in a structured format. which includes the text and all its variants and any notes upon it, from all the witnesses.
- Present a subset of this information in some other format in your publication. Possibly even in more than one format for different purposes.
Anyone familiar with modern methods of computer program design will immediately recognise a common computing pattern – pull the presentation layer out of the code, and do it as a separate layer. Don’t mix it in with the main logic. Let the logic get the data in whatever way is useful and reasonable; and then pass that to the front end to display in whatever way is useful. The two sections of the program can be developed separately. and if you need to change the output format, or the on-screen appearance, you don’t have to change every part of the program.
The Burghart paper does indicate that TEI (the database, essentially) can be used in this way, to generate different outputs.
But creating a file/database encoded in TEI means doing things in text files. That’s very error-prone at the best of times. TEI is just a format. What is needed is some “casual casual easy thing,” some bit of software that stores what you put in in TEI, and redisplays it in an easy way. I know people have attempted this, but the results that I have seen look awful.
Is there a tech billionaire in the house?
TEI is a very tech-heavy approach, that imposes a lot of pain upfront for no gain. It gets in the way. I can’t face doing it, and I’m a former programmer! In Word on the other hand I can just start, and get on with what I want to do. But I’m then stuck. There’s no easy way to transform the output into some other format, say from positive to negative or back again.
I’ve no idea what the answer is. In the meantime we’re stuck with Word.
For the New Testament, where there are thousands of witnesses, and stemmatics does not work, the apparatus is always presented negatively. Indeed in the Nestle-Aland edition, special symbols are introduced, known as “critical sigla”, indicating insertion and omission etc. These are supported by special Greek fonts, such as Gentium. I found an article online by Brent Nongbri here, describing them:
Um… yuk. I’ve not seen any classical text use these, however. This again is a presentation-layer thing, designed to reduce the amount of gunk at the bottom of the page, at the expense of intelligibility. Here’s a page of Jude, using these techniques.
That’s pretty awful, and only gives a tiny amount of data.
So there’s a world of pain here, for something that ought to be simple and an activity that is carried out in universities around the world.
In the meantime, I will stick with Word, and, since it is possible for me to give a positive apparatus, I will!
- Sébastien Moureau, “The Apparatus Criticus,” In: Edd.: Alessandro Bausi, &c., Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, Tredition : Hamburg (2015), p. 348-352 http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/155652[↩]
Thank you for this very interesting post. Part of the problem may be that critical editions seem to be fading in popularity, for the basic reason that they are a lot of work with little reward in terms of one’s academic career (I am told.)
I hope that isn’t true, but of course these things do take years to produce, so are not cost-effective for those living year to year. I was horrified to find that my modest efforts here have been going for a few years now.
I’ve learned TEI (and its specialized variant EpiDoc, used in epigraphy and papyrology) at Oxford and KCL about 15 years ago, and they remain the basic building blocs used in a number of discipline (EpiDoc for instance is what is used to populate papyri.info, but also epigraphic projects for sanskrit, maya and eastern asian languages), it is indeed separating presentation from content.
What many project have done is collaborative, wikipedia like, work on editions (such as the Suda on Line and the further Son of Suda Online/SoSOl), but a number of editions are done by scholars at home using an editor that controls the correct application of the XML schema. Back then we used Oxygen as editor…
But it is indeed not the most user friendly solution 🙁 Even if it did lead to good projects (inscriptions of Aphrodisias, inscriptions of cyrenaic, papyri.info, …) !
I hope you might share your thoughts on alternative ways to present the data?
Might one, for example, have the base text in widely-spaced lines, with the variant words directly below in a smaller font, between the lines, rather than grouped at the bottom of the page? (I realise this could get very messy when the variant text is longer than the base text).
Really there are two problems.
Keeping these separate is probably key.
So when I was working on the text, I had a word document, and every time I found a variant, I stuck a “**” after it in the text, threw a paragraph, and entered info underneath it:
** item – A, B; iterum -C (probably typo by scribe);
All easy enough to do.
But then the problem arises of how to transform that.
When I am editing posts in WordPress, and need to add a footnote, I just insert stuff inline [ref]my footnote[/ref] and when I save and publish, WordPress turns it into a number and a footnote at the bottom of the page.
Isn’t this the problem that Word macros were made to do? But Word macros really seem to be obsolete, although widely used, with no obvious modern successor. And they were always rather rubbish.
I don’t know.
It would be possible to hook the macro up to an access database; or, more likely, to some XML file.
There is software, TEI Publisher, that can create a TEI compliant file based on input from Microsoft Word, that seems to fit your use case (though I haven’t actually used it). See documentation and sample file with instructions.
Take a look at Michael Hendry’s online edition of Juvenal: https://www.curculio.org/Juvenal/s01.html
I can’t quite work out what TEI publisher does – the website assumes that the reader already knows! But interesting certainly. Thank you.
The most powerful and elegant software for critical edition purposes is Classical Text Editor from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and CSEL (https://cte.oeaw.ac.at/). It is programmed by Stefan Hagel, who is also very helpful. It is, however, somewhat expensive and has a fairly steep learning curve. Brepols invites editors in submit for Corpus Christianorum in Page-ready CTE format, a sign of its capability. It would be more than it’s worth for a brief edition, but worth investigating if you intend to keep doing critical editions.
I’m preparing a (very amateurish) critical edition of some sixteenth-century works. My method, which admittedly is massively inefficient compared to the line-numbers-and-footer-notes method, is simply to have a section of endnotes divided by paragraph number. Each paragraph’s respective group of endnotes is organized by the phrase in question. E.g.:
[Book, chapter, and paragraph number.] “this can be seen”—1st edn., “thid can be seen” (sic: f. 55r); corrected in 2nd edn. (p. 101). || “in the year 1522”—2nd edn. has “1532” (sic: p. 103). || [And so on with the notes…]
Obviously, if Word was at all capable of the traditional method I wouldn’t be grossly inflating my page count by resorting to this style of textual endnotes.
Maybe this will give you some ideas.
B.W.L.
Thank you!
I’m glad I’m still using TeX (ConTeXt ) 🙂
I was at a seminar this week where there was a demonstration of the freeware ChrysoCollate. You transcribe in an Excel-like interface (each word in a separate box, each witness in a new row, and you can re-order witnesses and use one as the basis to transcribe another), and then select your editorial text. It will generate a positive or negative apparatus for you for each unit and the whole thing is exported as a text file (ODT) that can be pasted into Word. It works out of the box: you can find it at https://cental.uclouvain.be/chrysocollate/