Re: [tei-council] Freeze on October 1

I suspect it’s a question of perspective. More modern source materials probably make this possible, but I’d consider it a very dangerous assumption to imply the partial identity of a range of sources. There are always differences that are elided by the transcriber/editor because they don’t consider them significant. But then you’re in the position of asserting that you can display the entire reading of #A or #B based on the source, where in fact you’re displaying a derivative, constructed thing + the readings of #A or #B—not simply the transcriptions of one or the other. I think in cases like the libretto example you sent me, you’re in good shape because you have only a few, easily compared examples. My head’s in the space of something like the Propertius example, where you’d be nuts to claim you could present anyone with just the reading of a particular witness across the whole text—again, because the text is the product of the editor’s decisions rather than a merge of all witness transcriptions. If this was simple, we’d get bored! :-)

On Sep 28, 2015, at 13:41 , Raffaele Viglianti wrote:

You could say that all the words (soon to be all textual structures?) outside of <app> are common to all sources surveyed, but you decide not to pick a best reading (the lemma) when the sources disagree, you simply document that they do not agree with multiple <rgd>s.