Espen,
 
Espen S. Ore wrote:
 
**omissions**
 
> Your suggestion makes sense (or at least I could be tempted to accept it
> until I have worried a little more about it) if we were only discussing
> "any" printed version of a text. But I am afraid I omitted mentioning
> that although we are doing that, we are also encoding Ibsen's own
> manuscripts.  In this latter case it is at least not instinctive to me
> that I would follow your suggestion. Another problem comes if we work
> with printed texts and I try to follow your suggestions: where should
> the entity or whatever which is used for the period (and I would like to
> remind you that the example from the TEI-bible itself uses the "period"
> as part of the <speaker> in the example from the "Beggar's Opera").
>
 
The encoding of manuscripts does raise different questions from printed
texts. I assume that the "period" at the end of speaker or end of
speaker plus stage directions is being interpreted as a marker for the
end of speaker (at least as far as Ibsen and his publishers are
concerned). In other words you wish to encode that speaker was indicated
by the occurrence of this marker, whether it is found directly following
speaker or after the stage directions following speaker.
 
> Since the <speaker> is not allowed to contain <stage> this still means
> that the text has moved past the <speaker> part before the "period"
> appears.  What should the "period" then be considered as part of? A
> non-defined part of the <sp> with a logical connection to the <speaker>
> which is not established formally?
>
 
In your original post you noted the following example:
 
> <sp><speaker>NORA<stage>something</stage>.</speaker>...
>
 
 One possible encoding would be to use the <seg> element to link the period
to the speaker element as follows:
 
<sp><speaker>NORA</speaker><stage>something</stage><seg type=speaker-marker
>entity</seg>.....</sp>
 
The <seg> element could be linked back to the appropriate <speaker>
element.
 
The TEI-bible (Sounds more impressive that just the Green Books!) does
use the "period" inside the <speaker> element in the Beggar's Opera.
(6.11.2.  Core Tags for Drama) Section 6.2 Treatment of Punctuation
notes "Where punctuation marks are disambiguated by tagging the
underlying feature they signal, it may be debated whether they should be
excluded or left as part of the text." In this case the debate must have
resolved to retain the "period" at the end of <speaker> as part of the
text.
 
My sympathies lie in the direction of encoding the smallest details of
manuscripts. What is considered presentation with the advent of modern
typography is actual information concerning the text and transmission of
a manuscript. I hope you will share your experiences with the Ibsen
materials with the list.
 
Patrick
 
--
Patrick Durusau
Information Technology Services
Scholars Press
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Co-Chair, SBL Seminar on Electronic Standards for Biblical Language Texts