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Exercises in modelling: textual variants

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Abstract

The article presents a model for annotating textual variants. The annotations made can be queried in order to analyse and find patterns in textual variation. The model is flexible, allowing scholars to set the boundaries of the readings, to nest or concatenate variation sites, and to annotate each pair of readings; furthermore, it organizes the characteristics of the variants in features of the readings and features of the variation. After presenting the conceptual model and its applications in a number of case studies, this article introduces two implementations in logical models: namely, a relational database schema and an OWL 2 ontology. While the scope of this article is a specific issue in textual criticism, its broader focus is on how data is structured and visualized in digital scholarly editing.

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Notes

  1. The example is taken from Gustave Roud’s œuvre: his writing is rooted in diary’s notes taken during ramblings in the Vaud region; the notes are elaborated for articles published in literary magazines and then assembled in collections of short pieces. A project of edition of the complete works of Gustave Roud is ongoing at the University of Lausanne, under the direction of Daniel Maggetti: Gustave Roud, Œuvres complètes <http://unil.ch/crlr/home/menuinst/projets-de-recherche/gustave-roud-oeuvres-completes.html> (last access May 6, 2019).

  2. It happens, for instance, for every literary work whose textual transmission spans various centuries.

  3. While Zumthor’s term mouvance is related to anonymity and textual variations in medieval manuscripts, his definition of ‘moving work’ might be valid also for modern literature: ‘l’unité complexe, mais aisément reconnaissable, que constitue la collectivité des versions en manifestant la matérialité […]. L’oeuvre est fondamentalement mouvante’ (Zumthor 1972: 73).

  4. The literature on the topic is vast and specific to literary periods and languages; most of the analysis are disseminated in editions and studies of specific authors or works. Some inspiring contributions are Colwell and Tune (1964), Brandoli (2007), Camps (2012), Schauweker (2013), Italia et al. (2015), Andrews (2016).

  5. Variante d’écriture (Grésillon 1994: 246); varianti immediate (Italia and Raboni 2010: 54). The definitions are gathered under the entry ‘Instant rewriting’ in Lexicon of Scholarly Editing <http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/lse/index.php/lexicon/instant-rewriting/> (last access May 6, 2019).

  6. This example springs again from the analysis of Roud’s papers. A first examination of the drafts connected to Petit traité de la marche en plaine (Roud 1932) suggests that proper nouns are replaced by generic characters.

  7. For what concerns Textual Criticism, particular attention is devoted to modelling in Unsworth (2002) and Pierazzo (2015).

  8. The aim here is the creation of a ‘model for production’ (Eide 2014:15), and the model in use is a ‘metaphor-like model’ (Ciula and Eide 2017).

  9. The model, highly interpretative, can be used with profit together with facsimiles of the images, more and more common in the digital panorama, or might be expanded to take into account the context (or, better, the co-text) of each reading. See Buzzetti (2002: 62): ‘the diacritical signs or the forms of markup are no longer conceived as an aid in visibly reconstructing an absent document, but rather as a means of “modelling” the physical and textual information contained in the original for the purpose of further processing’, and ‘[a]n adequate digital text representation must therefore be compatible with the application of the formal procedures of information processing which give algorithmic form to current methods and practices of textual criticism and interpretation.’.

  10. (Rivière 1974), vol. III, pièce n° LXXVI.

  11. Formalization of how to point to the location of a reading in the physical object and in the literary work is beyond the scope of this contribution.

  12. The edit distance between two strings is based on the number of operations required to transform the first string into the second one. The edit distance calculated using all four operations is the Damerau-Levenshtein distance.

  13. Molloy module, <http://www.beckettarchive.org/molloy/collatex/1606?lang=EN> (last access May 6, 2019).

  14. Lancelot, in four manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Cf. (Micha 1978–83, III: § XXVI).

  15. See (Vanhoutte 2007): ‘Recording each class for each possible relationship each location variant can have with all corresponding location variants from the other witnesses is therefore the closest approximation to an explicit classification one can aim for’. A location variant corresponds to a reading. In line with Vanhoutte study, the model analyses the variation in pairs of readings. This is not only the most consistent way to do it, but also the most thorough, because most of the time it would not be possible to summarize in one single annotation all the differences between all the readings.

  16. It should also be remembered that the model proposes one precise interpretation of the phenomenon at stake; a different interpretation would lead to a different model. Thus the model might not be suitable for all editorial projects.

  17. The critical text of Rivière’s edition is: ‘Par un matiner l’autrier | oï chanter un fou berchier; | s’en sui esmeü, | qu’il se vantoit qu’il ot geü | tout nu | entre les deux bras s’amie. | Il se vantoit de folie, | car cele amour est. vilaine, | més j’aim certes plus loiaument que nus; | puis que bele dame m’aime | je ne demant plus.’ The text is present in four manuscripts, indicated here with the corresponding sigils.

  18. Digital facsimiles are available on the library website at <http://digitale.bnnonline.it/index.php?it/119/giacomo-leopardi-canti> (last access May 6, 2019).

  19. Some details of the schema and the ontology are omitted, such as data-types and cardinality.

  20. To enhance readability, subjects are in bold and predicates are underlined.

  21. The visualization is obtained with WebVOWL 1.0.6, available at <http://visualdataweb.de/webvowl/> (last access May 6, 2019).

  22. The mapping to Vocabularies used for Linked Open Data is beyond the scope of this article; for the Witness class, the FRBF model and FABIO, its OWL formalization, should be considered. See FRBR-Aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FABiO), <http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/fabio> (last access May 6, 2019). In (Flanders and Jannidis 2015: 9–10) ontologies “are restricted to the conceptual model”; it is important to distinguish between the conceptual ontology and its logical implementation in an OWL Ontology, in order to understand why RDF Schema is considered a logical model in the same article (ibid 11).

  23. Except for unsupervised machine learning.

  24. It is the case, at least, for additions and deletions, and for linguistic categories using NLP tools.

  25. The graph structure is prominent in research connected to modelling text (Haentjens Dekker and Birnbaum 2017), semantic editions (Eide 2014), (Ciotti and Tomasi 2016), (Tomasi et al. 2018), software framework infrastructures based on graph solutions, such as Knora <http://www.knora.org/>  (last access May 6, 2019) and Alexandria Markup Text Repository (Haentjens Dekker and Birnbaum 2017).

  26. The first mention of RDF in the TEI-List goes back to 1999, see <https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A0=TEI-L> (last access May 6, 2019).

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  1. Centre des littératures en Suisse romande, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Elena Spadini

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Spadini, E. Exercises in modelling: textual variants. Int J Digit Humanities 1, 289–307 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00023-7

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