Re: Simple alternation

<unclear> was an attempt to interpret (ie translate into TEI)
the query marks in the edition, which I took (and take) to be a 
form of slightly cryptic editorial markup. Since our
current effort is directed toward producing a searchable Middle
English corpus, not necessarily a verbatim transcript of the
editions from which we are taking it -- all without recourse
to anything beyond a very stripped-down tag set -- an
alternative would be to recast the source into a more conventionally 
discursive text+note form, i.e. create a note out of whole cloth:

  meuyn <note>The first letter of this word is a bit hard to read,
  and might well be w-, hence 'weuyn.'</note>

On <choice> exclusivity...

Renaissance literature is chock full of trick poems and
the like (including acrostics, echo poems, anagrams, and
verse lines that can be resequenced to mean complementary,
or wholly opposite, things). I had never thought to use <choice>
for these: it would not work for all of them, I think, but would
be an interesting challenge to apply to many of them.

pfs

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016, at 15:15, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> 
> > On Oct 18, 2016, at 9:02 AM, Paul Schaffner <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 
> > Given this presentation in an edition:
> > 
> > http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/mec/queries/meuynweuyn.jpg
> > 
> > (which nicely and succinctly says, 'this word is either "meuyn"
> > or "weuyn" but I can't tell which), what is the simplest TEI
> > way to capture this meaning? (not the appearance, just the meaning.)
> > 
> > Does this suffice?
> > 
> > <choice>
> >   <unclear>meuyn</unclear>
> >   <unclear>weuyn</unclear>
> > </choice>
> 
> Er, why tag it as unclear?  It looks perfectly legible to me
> in the image.  
> 
> Like Magdalena Turska, I think this looks like app and rdg.
> Both readings are from the same witness, but that’s not
> unknown.
> 
> If you don’t want to use that, by all means use seg around
> the two words.  
> 
> > 
> > Or is something like this required?
> > 
> > <choice>
> >  <unclear exclude="#weuyn" xml:id="meuyn">meuyn</unclear>
> >  <unclear exclude="#meuyn" xml:id="weuyn">weuyn</unclear>
> > </choice>
> > 
> > Or is there another, better, way altogether?
> 
> The documentation for ‘choice’ says
> 
>     Because the children of a choice element all represent alternative 
>     ways of encoding the same sequence, it is natural to think of them 
>     as mutually exclusive. However, there may be cases where a full 
>     representation of a text requires the alternative encodings to be 
>     considered as parallel.
> 
> It would be a more obvious choice if the Guidelines specified one 
> interpretation as a default and provided an attribute for overriding 
> that interpretation.  But I read the paragraph quoted as saying that
> you as an encoder are at liberty to take either interpretation; I’d put
> a remark in the header to inform later readers of the document.
> 
> 
> ********************************************
> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Black Mesa Technologies LLC
> [email protected]
> http://www.blackmesatech.com
> ********************************************
> 
-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
[email protected] | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/