positionality of marginalia within an entry

[Nikhil-Ramachandran]

Position markers---left-top, left-middle, left-bottom etc.---represent the location of marginalia within a folio. However, when we extract an entry from such a folio and make it a self containing entity, the position markers of marginalia corresponding to an extracted entry cannot be that of the folio.

What I mean here is that, suppose folio "001r" has two entires "Molds1" and "Molds2" (as shown below), and both these entries have a single margin-note each at positions left-top and left-bottom respectively. When we extract "Molds1" and "Molds2" as separate entries, the position of marginalia (left-top and left-bottom) correspond to the folio "001r" and not to entries "Molds1" and "Molds2". To put it succinctly, I think, we cannot directly inherit the position markers of the folio while creating margin-blocks for entries. Should each entry then have its own position-markers? Will an interleave solve this problem?

<folio number="001r">
p001_1Molds1
Description-of-Molds1
left-top margin-note-for-Molds1

p001_2Molds2
Description-of-Molds2
left-bottom margin-note-for-Molds2
</folio>

One caveat would be, if an entry spans a single folio, in such a case, inheriting the position markers of the folio would not be a problem.

[tcatapano]

Would like other people's opinions on this, but here are some options I see which might clarify things:

• do not report the position of the margin blocks at all
• surround the position info for a margin block with the text "at...of folio XXXX", e.g., "at top left margin of folio XXX"
• give margin blocks footnote functionality (see https://elotroalex.github.io/ed/documentation/#footnotes)

Any other ideas?

[tcatapano]

@Nikhil-Ramachandran: could you let me know of a good example entry or folio in which margin blocks are particularly bedeviling?

[Nikhil-Ramachandran]

@tcatapano: so far the margin blocks seem to correspond to the main body of each entry. However, they maintain a semantic distinction, or difference, from the main body of each entry. In the sense that they cannot be easily integrated into an entry's main body without substantial editorial intervention. I think we should preserve the position markers of each margin block, but find a way to re-configure the position-markers for our unit of analysis, which is at the level of entry, rather than folio.
I came across the above problem when I was looking at a relative straight forward folio with 4 entries. Each entry had a margin-block. I realized that the position of the margin-block related to the bottom entries were not accurate when inherited from the folio, hence wrote this post. I do have exceedingly long entries, but their margin-blocks have the same problem. p141r_1 is a long entry which spans 141r, 141v, and 142r.