Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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text and to previous annotations, they can make reflections on earlier work or create a new
<strong>in</strong>terpretation. We have designed a schema to handle these references and to support the
distributed and collaborative work with us<strong>in</strong>g more Annotation Layers <strong>in</strong> one edition (Bauer et
al. 2008).
At the same time, the authors noted that to make exact references to any po<strong>in</strong>t <strong>in</strong> the text, they needed
to be able to describe the physical structure of the text. The base text layer was stored as a basic TEI
document, and as the palimpsest provided an exist<strong>in</strong>g physical structure with “codices, quires, leaves,
sides, columns and l<strong>in</strong>es,” these were used as the primary structure for their reference system <strong>in</strong> order
to def<strong>in</strong>e exact references to specific document parts. Such references were needed to support
“philological process<strong>in</strong>g,” text annotation, and mapp<strong>in</strong>g between images and transcription. The authors
did not discuss whether they considered us<strong>in</strong>g Canonical Text Service (CTS) references.
Bauer et al. argued that TEI P4 and EpiDoc were less useful than the Hypereidoc model <strong>in</strong> the creation
of philological annotations because they required that such annotations be stored <strong>in</strong> the form of XML
tags <strong>in</strong>serted <strong>in</strong>to a document, mean<strong>in</strong>g that annotations could be embedded by philologists only if the
tags were balanced (because of the need for a well-formed XML document). Their proposed solution
was to develop a reference system based on the physical structure of the document. “This enables the
handl<strong>in</strong>g of any overlapp<strong>in</strong>g annotation,” Bauer et al. stated. “With this reference system miss<strong>in</strong>g word
and sentence boundaries can easily be described, even if <strong>in</strong>terpreted differently by various philologists.
Punctuations miss<strong>in</strong>g from the document can also easily be coded,” they wrote.
The unique nature of the palimpsest, however, with secondary text written over other orig<strong>in</strong>al texts, led
them to def<strong>in</strong>e the text of Archimedes and Hypereides as the “undertext” and the new texts that were
written over them as the “overtext.” The page number<strong>in</strong>g of the “overtext” was used as the base for
their reference system, and they def<strong>in</strong>ed their “order<strong>in</strong>g and <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g layer” <strong>in</strong>dependently from the
“base text layer” and stored these data <strong>in</strong> an external XML file, not<strong>in</strong>g that philologists would not
necessarily agree on a page order and might want to use their own “order<strong>in</strong>g and <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g layer.”
While the “base text layer’s” physical structure was based on the overtext, only pages were identified
with overtext leaf and side while columns and l<strong>in</strong>es were marked us<strong>in</strong>g the undertext so that the l<strong>in</strong>es
of Hypereides text could be specifically identified.
The Hypereidoc reference system supported three types of references: absolute references that po<strong>in</strong>t at
a character position <strong>in</strong> the base text; <strong>in</strong>ternal relative references that po<strong>in</strong>t to a character position <strong>in</strong> the
text “<strong>in</strong>serted by a previous annotation <strong>in</strong> the same annotation layer”; and external relative references
that po<strong>in</strong>t to a character position <strong>in</strong> the text “<strong>in</strong>serted by an annotation <strong>in</strong> a previous Annotation Layer.”
Several types of annotation are supported, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g embedded and overlapp<strong>in</strong>g annotations. They then
developed a customized system that made use of the XML Po<strong>in</strong>ter Language (XPo<strong>in</strong>ter), 321 which
allows one “to po<strong>in</strong>t to an arbitrary po<strong>in</strong>t <strong>in</strong> an XML document.” While TEI P5 has developed
specifications for the use of XPo<strong>in</strong>ter, 322 Bauer et al. criticized these guidel<strong>in</strong>es for th<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g about
XPo<strong>in</strong>ter only as a po<strong>in</strong>ter to an arbitrary tag rather than as an arbitrary position <strong>in</strong> a text, a feature
that did not support the type of overlapp<strong>in</strong>g annotation that they needed. Nonetheless, want<strong>in</strong>g to
ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> maximum compatibility with TEI P5, they made use of the and tags and
publish an additional “flat file format” of their publications that does not make use of XPo<strong>in</strong>ter.
321 http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework/
322 http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SA.html#SATS