This is an interesting monkey wrench, as it goes straight to the heart 
of the ontological anxiety that this whole discussion provokes in me.

If I understand correctly, what's going on here is that the source of 
your encoding is a letterpress edition which is itself an "encoded" 
version of the original manuscript. In that letterpress edition, a 
variety of typographical features have been used to represent some 
features of the original. Presumably (hopefully) that mapping is well 
documented, and consistently applied. I say "hopefully" partly because I 
am a rotten old cynic, but also because I assume that you are more 
interested in an encoding that somehow represents the *manuscript* than 
one that represents the letterpress. So you are doing something not 
unlike producing a digital version of a black and white photo of an oil 
painting. This may well be the best practical solution to the problem in 
hand, and I am certainly not trying to rubbish the entire exercise, but 
it does make me think that it would be misleading to try to 
over-sophisticate the markup you use.

This discussion about <subst> arises from the fact that deciding whether 
something is a "substitution" is really an interpretive gesture. Some 
say that if you are strictly trying to represent what you see on the 
page, you should not use it at all: all you see on the page is deletion 
and addition.    And even that's not entirely clear -- maybe that 
supralinear addition is supralinear only  because there wasn't 
originally space on the line, and is not strictly an addition at all. 
Maybe the words apparently struck through were not meant to be deleted, 
but underlined (maybe the dots underneath the word indicate that the 
deletion was a mistake)...

In earlier discussion, I think there was recognition that we were 
getting into murky waters if we proposed using <subst> for anything 
other than clear non-controversial cases where something was written, 
deleted, and replaced by something else. Hence the proposal to tie its 
content model down severely. For other, murkier, cases other, murkier, 
solutions seem appropriate. My view is that we should think of <subst> 
purely as a convenience for the commonest and simplest cases, and 
constrain its content model accordingly.

So, in your case, I don't think you are looking at a <subst> at all. You 
are looking at a supralinear addition which has been deleted, for some 
reason.




On 20/08/11 00:30, Markus Flatscher wrote:
> Syd,
> All,
>
> come to think of it, I'd like to throw<subst><del>a monkey wrench</del><add>an idea</add></subst>  out there for all of you to consider:
>
> The thing that bothers me about the<subst>  task force's proposal to lock<subst>  down to<add>  and<del>  exclusively is that even working from letterpress editions, I sometimes come across substitutions that do not necessarily involve clear forms of deletion or addition; I would assume that people working from manuscript would have many more use cases---ping Elena (Are you on the<subst>  task force?)
>
> <del>'s definition (more so than<add>'s) as text "deleted, marked as deleted, or otherwise indicated as superfluous or spurious" seems to me to suggest that there should be some _physical_ indication of deletion, typically strikeout or dots, which is why I shudder at the thought of<del rendition="#no-strikeout">  or<del rend="text-decoration:none;">
>
> What if we had two generic (but semantically more descriptive) elements, say<substituens>  and<substitendum>, and delegated the appearance of the phenomenon in the source to @rend(ition) instead?
>
> Curious to hear your thoughts,
>
> Markus
>
> On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:56:30 -0400
>   "Markus Flatscher "<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>> Syd,
>>
>> in principle, your suggestion is feasible, and may turn out to be the case if checked against the manuscript page. However, based on the rendering/typesetting conventions of this particular letterpress edition, I'd tend to disagree: horizontal alignment like this seems to consistently indicate a substitution; insertions, on the other hand, are consistently rendered in one of the following ways, depending on the presence and location of insertion marks in MS:
>>
>> * baseline caret and/or supralinear caret (carets can themselves be struck out)
>> * in the absence of any insertion marks in MS, the word is horizontally positioned to indicate the logical insertion point in the text
>>
>> So if it were an insertion, as you suggest below, based on the conventions of the letterpress typesetting, I would expect to see "Speculatists" positioned to the left of "Theorists" (assuming there was no insertion mark). (If this doesn't make sense in writing, I can provide an example from the print edition.)
>>
>> Thought experiment: For the sake of the argument, let's assume (1) that the example appears in MS exactly like on printed page, and that (2) we had strong supporting evidence that the authorial intent was in fact substitution, e.g. in the form of an authorial errata list or diary entry or what have you. Given those premises, how would you encode it?
>>
>> Markus
>>
>> On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:03:14 -0400
>> Syd Bauman<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>>> I'm wondering if calling that most interesting case an obvious
>>> substitution might be a bit of a stretch for some. After all, the
>>> authorial intent might have been
>>>
>>> * writes "Theorists and men of ..."
>>> * Hmmm ... let's make that "Speculatists, theorists, and other men of
>>>   business  ..."
>>> * inserts "Speculatists"
>>> * [before getting around to "," and lower-casing 'T'] Hmmm ... that
>>>   sounds over-the-top, "Theorists" will have to do
>>> * crosses out "Speculatists"
>>>
>>> no?
>>>
>>>
>>>> David and I here at Rotunda have some semi-diplomatic
>>>> transcriptions in the Alexander Hamilton Papers that sometimes
>>>> contain the following situation:
>>>>
>>>> http://mf3vb.ei.virginia.edu/subst.jpg
>>>>
>>>> As it is on the page, I would hesitate to interpret “Theorists” on the
>>>> baseline as a case of “restored” or “stet”, and it's certainly not a
>>>> case for<del>.
>>>>
>>>> To my mind, this is a word substitution where explicit cancellation is
>>>> not marked; since the insertion “Speculatists” was cancelled, my guess
>>>> would be that the reason was a “mid-substitution” change of mind on the
>>>> author's part.
>>>>
>>>> More generically, it is the case of text that has no distinctive
>>>> features other than the fact that it is clearly part of a substitution.
>>>>
>>>> We considered two solutions for this:
>>>>
>>>> (1) schema modification to allow mixed content inside<subst>
>>>> (2) schema modification to allow<seg>  inside<subst>  (cf. David's
>>>> question datestamped 2011-01-07 under FR ticket #2859355)
>>>>
>>>> FWIW, we decided on (2), thus:
>>>>
>>>> <subst>
>>>> <seg>Theorists</seg>
>>>> <add>
>>>> <del>Speculatists</del>
>>>> </add>
>>>> </subst>
>>>>
>>>> If anyone has suggestions for a more elegant solution under P5, we
>>>> would be grateful to hear about them (maybe under a separate
>>>> thread?).
>>
>> --
>> Markus Flatscher, Editorial and Technical Specialist
>> ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
>> PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
>> Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
>> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
> --
> Markus Flatscher, Editorial and Technical Specialist
> ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
> PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
> Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
> Email: [log in to unmask]