Encoding of Variant Taxonomies in TEI

Abstract

The inherent exibility of the digital format has favored the rise of editions that enable access to every witness of a particular textual work. These types of editions might have dierent goals and seek to answer dierent research questions, but they usually coincide in drawing attention to the importance of textual variants. To maximize the computational analysis that may be practiced with the variants in dierent witnesses, a complex taxonomy that reects the diversity of cases is required. Many scholars have followed the recommended TEI method for encoding types of variantsthat is, through the attributes @cause or @type inside the element <rdg>-while others nd that method insucient. These attributes are not able to enclose the hierarchy intrinsic to complicated taxonomies or the overlap of classes in an ecient way. However, the TEI Guidelines do oer a module that addresses this complex encoding issue: feature structures. The method proposed in