Theoretical writings (Mondrian)

We have insufficient knowledge of the properties of the theoretical writings to make final decisions about their encoding. Decisions documented here should be regarded as provisional.

The notebooks

Properties of the notebooks that we have to deal with are:

• Texts may be written starting from the first page towards the last page or the other way around
• Texts may have been rotated with respect to the normal writing direction
• Texts may be discontinuous (interrupted by sketch)
• Sometimes sketches may be overwritten by texts

To take this into account, we use the following system:

• The sequence of the surface elements in the facsimile element follows the physical sequence of the notebook, as best we can determine.
• The content of the notebook is transcribed in div elements. Page breaks are inserted in the writing order: when Mondrian wrote a tekst that starts at p. 100 and continues on page 99, we encode:

<div>
  <pb n="100"/>
  ... content ...
  <pb n="99"/>
  ... content ...
</div>

• Sketches without commentary are contained (as a figure element) in their own div
• Divs can (of course) also contain texts and accompanying sketches
• When an earlier sketch is overwritten by a new text, we will have two dives where the same page number occurs. The situation will presumably be clarified in a note.

<div>
  <pb n="88"/>
  <figure> ... </figure>
</div>
<div>
  ...
  <pb n="88"/>
  ... transcribed text ...
</div>

• As the physical sequence is determined by the sequence of the surfaces, and the logical sequence by the sequence of the transcription, no particular meaning is to be assigned to the sequence of the divs in the transcription.

Article in installments

For now, we have decided to relate source and destination texts to each other by pointing from the destination to the source at the paragraph and at the term level.

These references may look like:

At paragraph level (in this example there are two source paragraphs):

<p xml:id="p2" corresp="BornInHollandTest.xml#p1 BornInHollandTest.xml#p3">

At term level:

which obscure <term xml:id="t1" corresp="BornInHolland.xml#t3">pure reality</term>.

Stages of writing: the TEI also uses the term ‘revision campaigns’, see http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/PH.html#PH-changes. They are identified on div’s and other elements using the change-attribute. The change attributes points to change-elements collected in a listChange-element in the header (in profileDesc/creation). listChange-elements can nest, in order to describe groups of related changes. To be decided: how do the values in the change attribute relate to the values in the seq-attribute on add’s and dels?

Rotation of the writing surface is encoded on the zones within the surfaces:

No rotate-attribute or rotate=”0”	Zone contains normal writing
rotate=”90”	Zone contains writing sideways/downward
rotate=”-90”	Zone contains writing sideways/upward
rotate=”180”	Zone contains top-down writing