Print edition: static hypertext
Print collections of fragmentary authors adopt conventions for representing many different references or links to other sources and bibliographic data. Such conventions are the fruit of a long editorial tradition and can be considered a sort of "static hypertexts" produced by print culture technology.
The screenshots of this page show conventions and criteria used in modern print editions of fragmentary authors (examples are drawn from Berti 2009 - limited preview):
1) editing and commenting text re-uses
2) concordance tables
3) indexes of sources (a) and names (b)
4) bibliography
1) Editing and commenting text re-uses.
"Editing a text re-use" means first of all extracting it from the text of the author who has quoted or re-used it. See Print edition: excerpting "fragments". In this screenshot a "fragment" of Istros has been extracted from the lexicon of Harpocration.
Secondly, the editor adds two other kinds of information:
- witnesses and parallel texts (loci paralleli), i.e. other sources that quote or re-use the same "fragment" (with same or similar words) or that deal with the same topic treated in it: see Multiple text re-uses of the same information;
- critical apparatus: variants of the manuscripts of the text that preserves the quotation and philological conjectures proposed by scholars about the same text.
Finally the text of the "fragment" is translated into a modern language and commented (with footnotes to the commentary that include references to other sources and bibliographic information).
Modern editors adopt also a distinction between testimonia (T) and fragmenta (F). Testimonia are information about fragmentary authors, such as place and date of birth, work titles, work contents, etc.; Fragmenta describe every form of text re-use of works that do not otherwise survive.
2) Concordance tables.
"Concordance tables" are a fundamental tool of critical editions because they collect information about other editions.
In this screenshot every text re-use edited in Berti 2009 is listed with concordances to two other pre-existing editions of Istros (FHG and FGrHist). The last column of the table includes also a reference to the source texts of the "fragments" (also called "witnesses": see Multiple text re-uses of the same information).
3a) Indexs (sources).
Indexes may contain many different sources, such as literary sources, inscriptions, and papyri.
3b) Indexes (names).
"Names" means many different entities, such as proper names, technical terms, geographic names, historical events, etc.
4) Bibliography.
Every edition has a final bibliography with full citations of bibliographic data. In this example every bibliographic record is accompanied with a reference to the related "fragments" of Istros.
