Residual or Essential:  On the Problem of Overlap as Argument to Broaden the Solution Space of Markup

1. Abstract

We return to the problem of overlap in embedded markup. We argue that the addressing of overlap as a merely technical issue signals a myopic view in the field of digital textual scholarship. Overlap is not a residual problem in an otherwise evolved and exclusive solution to text modeling. Instead, the problem of overlap indicates that digital text should be approached scholarly by application of multple modeling paradigms. To further suport our argument we present how the SPEEDy standoff properties editor succeeds in combining different markup ontologies productively.