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 divs 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 main divs in the transcription.
• 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

• Stages of writing: we do not expect to use what TEI calls ‘revision campaigns’, see http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/PH.html#PH-changes. (They can be referred to 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.) Rather, we will probably clarify the probable dating of the various section in prose.

Article in installments

The problem is here that what is conceptually a single article was published as sections in multiple installments of the journal De Stijl. A documentary TEI encoding would include elements that connect two installments but are unnecessary from the conceptual point of view. It might also want to represent e.g. note numbers as they appeared in the original installments, rather than in a unified and continuous numbering.

We agreed upon the following:

• the article as a whole will be transcribed in a single XML file
• the article is a single div with subdivs for the installments
• the facsimile element will contain surfaces for all of the pages from the different installments that contain text of the article; as usual page break elements in the transcription will refer to the relevant surfaces. The n attribute on the <pb> elements will give the original page number.
• the transcription will ignore metatext that is merely there to point readers to the following or previous installments
• notes by Mondrian will be in a separate div (type = notes) at the same hierarchic level of the article (notes encoded as <origNote>s). The notes div will contain page break elements to faciltate page by page display of the original version. Notes will have their original numbers in their n-attributes.