Encoding Renditional Information in Primary Source Texts

Encoding Renditional Information in Primary Source
Texts

Julia
Flanders

Brown University
Women Writers Project
Julia_Flanders@brown.edu

Paul
Caton

Brown University
paul@swansong.stg.brown.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Introduction
Renditional information--by which we mean broadly any facts about the
appearance, ornamentation, or layout of text on a page--occupies an
uncertain position in current theories of humanities text encoding. At the
heart of the problem lie longstanding philosophical questions about the
nature of 'text'. Does a particular physical instantiation of a work combine
an an essential component with non-essential features that can vary without
altering the essence? On the surface it would seem that markup schemes where
the defined tag set is weighted towards capturing structure rather than
appearance (such as the TEI and most other SGML-based schemes) lend support
to a practicable distinction between the 'essential text' and its
renditional 'packaging' of any one instance (see Renear, Renear et al.,
DeRose et al.). On the other hand it might be argued that much of what we
commonly consider renditional information--line-spacing, indentation, font
family, use of italics, small caps, etc.--serves to impose structure and
draw attention to particular types of content. It would follow that to
capture the structure of a document together with identifiable content
objects like quotes, foreign words, technical terms, and so on, makes it
unnecessary to capture the renditional details per se.
Many scholarly encoding projects, however, capture primary source data for
quasi-archival purposes, and their transcription needs to supply information
to people with a variety of critical interests and a corresponding variety
of opinions as to what constitutes significant textual information. These
projects have to confront the problem of dealing with visual information on
its own terms (as opposed to treating it as a cue for structure and
content). A clear methodological framework is essential even for a project
with ambitions to capture all possible renditional information, let alone
one with more modest and realistic goals; without such a framework it is
impossible to determine what and how to record. This paper focuses on the
problem of defining a rationale for the capture of renditional information:
on what grounds do we decide what kinds of rendition to record? and if we
want to use meaning as a way of deciding that rendition is important enough
to record, what is the horizon of meaningfulness?

Methodological frameworks
The possible criteria by which renditional features will be deemed worthy or
unworthy of capture emerge from a variety of different sources: some of them
pragmatic, some deriving from aesthetic theory or literary criticism. Some
of the most significant are listed below, and will be discussed in more
detail in the finished paper. These do not represent mutually exclusive
categories, but rather overlapping conceptual axes which may interact in
various ways: for instance, the criterion of meaningfulness requires one to
specify a user population for whom meaning is being defined (linguistic
meaning? literary meaning? cultural meaning?).
The criteria we will consider are as follows:
the criterion of use: what kinds of rendition need to be recorded
in order to provide for the needs of an identified user
population.
the criterion of meaningfulness: whether a given piece of
renditional information affects our understanding or interpretation
of the text.
the criterion of substantiveness, distinguished either from
accident or from the decorative: whether information considered
decorative or accidental contributes to our understanding of the
text.
the criterion of measurability or perceptibility and the
possibility of accuracy: under this criterion, differences which are
too small or difficult to measure can be omitted; this also raises
issues of the meaningful units of measurement.
the criterion of intentionality, in which case we need to ask
whose intention: authorial? printer's house style? compositor's
effort to get all the words onto the page?

A phenomenon like wrong-font letters might fare very differently depending on
the criteria chosen: on the grounds of meaningfulness or substantiveness we
might not record it, but on grounds of measurability and serving a certain
user population (say, analytical bibliographers) we might well include it,
and on the issue of intentionality the inclusion or omission would carry a
strong theoretical message.

Creating a taxonomy of rendition
Developing a taxonomy of renditional characteristics, however simple, must be
done by individual projects based on their own location within the
approaches described above. If renditional information is to be used for any
kind of processing, retrieval, or comparison, it must be described
systematically using terms which identify the significant boundaries between
phenomena (for instance, alignment and justification). It is also important
(as with any kind of data capture) to decompose complex phenomena into their
basic significant parts so that each may be described distinctly.

References

Stephen
DeRose
et al
What is Text, Really?

Journal of Computing in Higher Education

1
2

Winter 1990

Allen
Renear

Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of
Textuality

Kathryn
Sutherland

Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory

Oxford

1997

Allen
Renear
et al
Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem
of Overlapping Hierarchies

N.
Ide

Research in Humanities Computing

Oxford

1995