Manuscript and Physical Document Encoding

Some philosophical issues

Note that these are really two separate, though closely related issues:

• All documents are physical; manuscripts are just a specific category whose physicality is particularly inescapable
• Special problems of manuscripts include issues having to do with handwriting and with the fact that the format of the page is essentially unregulated
• Special problems of print documents include chiefly issues having to do with collation and pagination

There are some aspects of the encoding of physical document structures which are common to print and MS documents, so we treat them together

Similarly, there are some issues having to do with our perception of the physical exemplar (esp. having to do with legibility and conjecture) that are common to both.

By and large, the TEI is focused, methodologically, on the text as linguistic rather than material information: its encoding provisions for genre, language, content are rich and detailed, while its provisions for material information are fairly minimal. Textual materiality poses some interesting conceptual problems for markup systems:

• it is not so readily representable as a logical structure
• its descriptors are less well codified
• it has typically been theorized as secondary to the text's logical structure
• representing materiality in formal terms is challenging

We raise these here mostly as signposts to issues that may be interesting, rather than trying to give an adequate treatment here; there's a lot of interesting debate on this topic and if you're interested we can provide some pointers

For now, we're just going to cover some practical encoding points.

Encoding the physical document

In TEI, the primary emphasis of the encoding is on the text stream (paragraphs, divisions, and so forth)

• the physical document can also be represented, but since physical document structures overlap with logical document structures, the physical structures are typically represented by milestone elements of various sorts, as we saw a moment ago:
• pb,cb, lb
• also milestone for other kinds of boundaries: for instance, signatures
• fw for aspects of the printed forme work: page numbers, running heads, catchwords, signatures, etc.
• note where they go in relation to structural elements: where they belong

An Alternate View of the Universe

Note that the physical structure can also be represented as the primary structure, for instance using div type="page | signature | etc."

Illegibility and unclarity

• unclear for places where you can read but aren’t certain, want to express uncertainty
• supplied for places where you can’t read, but can supply a reading from another source, or from editorial intuition
• gap for places where you can’t read and can’t surmise either
• damage for places that have been damaged (e.g. torn, burned, eaten by bugs)
• these elements may nest to represent more complex situations: e.g. a damaged portion part of which is illegible, part of which can be deciphered with uncertainty, part of which can’t be read but can be surmised.

Additions, deletions

add and del: these contain brief additions or deletions in the text; provide a way to indicate where located, whose handwriting

addSpan and delSpan: these are empty elements which mark the start of an addition or deletion, and point (with the spanTo attribute) to the end of the span, which is marked by an anchor that carries an xml:id.

Note that for spans and handwriting identification, need to declare Chapter 18 (transcr)

Handwriting Identification

To identify the person whose handwriting is present, and also to provide information about the handwriting (what style, what ink, etc.)

• hand in the TEI header gives a place to locate this information

Handwriting Identification: in the text

• the hand attribute on add and del points to the hand element
• the handShift element indicates a place where the handwriting starts or changes, and carries attributes that allow you to identify the new handwriting, the old handwriting (if applicable), and various other aspects (e.g. the ink, the writing style, etc.)