La variación textual y su visualización en las ediciones digitales de textos medievales/ Textual variation and its visualization in digital editions of medieval texts

Abstract

A main feature of the textual transmission of medieval vernacular works is the high degree of variation in the extant witnesses. Although this issue has been known since the rise of new philology in the 90s, the editor of medieval texts is forced to reflect it in his or her work. The difficulty lies in ranking the variants with objective criteria and presenting the reader with the most relevant of these in an intelligible manner. The difficulty is even greater when variations occur in the number and order of the verses. Electronic editions have a great capacity to reflect the complexity of textual transmission, but they require an interface that can read and illustrate this complexity for the reader. This paper outlines the problem here and reviews a number of tools that offer potential solutions; some conclusions are drawn regarding the limitations and hence the usefulness of currently available tools.