Being currently an ongoing project (it could be called beta), the first steps aim to locate Schopenhauer’s marginalia, to classify, to encode, and to edit them digitally. Although this procedure already adds interpretation and reflection, more important is now to report every passage marked or annotation added, so that we can later speculate about their significance. In some cases, though, explanations have been added as editor’s notes.

Attribution and Classification

Arthur Hübscher confirmed the provenance of many of books in Schopenhauer’s library, indicated which ones may have written marks, and transcribed a few annotations (1968: XX-XXI). Not all of the annotations were listed by Hübscher, so, when needed, we try to look for a confirmation of the provenance. The text where they are anchored to may shed some light on the authorship, but other more formal approaches are taken into consideration, such as the form of handwriting. In the books we find notes written in Spanish, which may not look like Schopenhauer’s writing, that is the Kurrentschrift with the typical sharp and strong strokes in contrast to the more rounded of Lateinschrift. The context and the language could determine which style to use, and Schopenhauer was indeed using both even in the same sentence, as the manuscript of his German translation of Baltasar Gracián shows:

"Quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum. Satz aus der Scholastischen Philosophie", Gracians Handorakel MS: 87v, Schopenhauer-Archiv.

The analysis of Schopenhauer’s annotations and marks reveals reading processes in several ways, such as types of interaction (writing comprehension, translation, studying), influences, creative perspectives or personal identification. In order to set a fully editorial criteria for the later encoding, we have sort out Schopenhauer’s typical styles of marking: formal (underlining, interlinear gloss, vertical lines, exclamation marks), intentional (appreciative comments, indexation, cross references), material (errors, variations, amendments).

Although the edition offers the facsimile (courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg and the Schopenhauer Archiv), the goal is to transcribe wholly or partially as well some of the original text in the books containing annotations. The transcriptions of the books are semi-diplomatic, long ‘s’ (∫) are, for example, not preserved, but original spelling, line and page breaks are transcribed and encoded, because sometimes the marks depend directly on the original layout, punctuation, etc.

Encoding

The edition follows the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standard for the representation of texts in digital form, based on XML.

The bibliographical information related to the book (repository, provenance, library, etc.) is encoded in the <teiHeader> using <biblFull> within <sourceDesc>. For every additional information on marks and annotations we use <additions>, as well as other elements which inform on normalization, hyphenation, etc.

For the encoding of the book we limit the granularity to TEI modules and elements related to the encoding of printed resources, taking into consideration other elements when they relate directly to the marginalia or help to document them.

For the encoding of marginalia we apply elements normally used for the manuscript modeling: additions, deletions, and omissions; substitutions; writing, decoration. Some of the elements and attributes that can be used for the transcription of marginalia are <add>, <gloss>; <note>; <span>; <addSpan>; <anchor/>; <gloss>; <handNotes> @type, @place, @rendition; @rend; @hand, etc. We have decided to use mostly the <add> element, which "contains letters, words, or phrases inserted in the source text by an author, scribe, or a previous annotator or corrector" (TEI, P5: 3.0.0) adding an attribute selection of @type and @subtype (also @hand, @place, @medium…), which allows us to cover all the taxonomy of annotations, e.g.:

<add type="Glosse" subtype="index"> Cross reference to a page number </add>
<add type="Glosse" subtype="statement"> Gloss on a passage </add>
<add type="Korrektur" subtype="union"> Amend which joins two separated words </add>
<add type="Korrektur" subtype="punctuation"> Modification of the original punctuation </add>
<add type="Randstreichung" subtype="triple"> Triple lateral mark on the page margin </add>
<add type="Unterstreichung"> Underlining </add>

We are aware of the fact that marginalia are a sort of textual manifestation prone to cause problems with elements overlapping in XML (Schmidt 2010: 343-344), but after having set a primaly taxonomy in our corpus, we did not find the need of using them.

Publication

One fundamental idea leading this editorial project comes also from the need for a complete and simplified reference model for digital editing, where analysis, modeling, transcription, encoding, visualization and publication can be simplified in order to facilitate the control of the editorial work, generally planed as an individual project and normally without a strong technical support.

This thought is again behind the decision of using the TEICHI module for Drupal, a digital publishing framework, which helps to overcome easily (for our needs) the barriers between the encoded text and the online publication. TEICHI is a modular tool for displaying documents encoded according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative as pages in a Drupal-based website www.teichi.org . Although it is not an out of the box publishing solution, the module allows, briefly put, to use the XSLT capabilities to process TEI/XML within the Drupal environment and to put digital facsimiles next to transcriptions.

Due to the fact that the TEICHI framework is limited to a subset of TEI Lite P5, we used instead our own schema and adapted the default XSLT/CSS/Javascript files.

References

Studies referenced in this digital scholary edition are given on the Bibliography section.

The project was presented at "II Congreso Internacional de Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas. Innovación, globalización e impacto", Madrid, 5-7.10.2015: "Marcas autógrafas en libros impresos. Interpretación, codificación con XML-TEI, publicación con Drupal" [see the presentation]; at the 6th AIUCD Conference "Il telescopio inverso: big data e distant reading nelle discipline umanistiche", Rome, 26-28.01.2017: "Reading Habits: Marginalia in Author's Libraries (Interpretation, Encoding, and Digital Publication)" [see the poster]; and in the following paper: "Anotaciones manuscritas en bibliotecas de autor. Propuesta de etiquetado y de publicación digital", Revista de Humanidades Digitales, Vol. 1 (2017), 116-131. [http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/rhd.vol.1.2017.16563 ]