We’ve discussed this before, but I still find myself tripping over terminology!
I had a (rare) moment of clarity. Yes! Exciting isn’t it? I realized that the problem with nomenclature, which had been lurking vaguely in the back on my mind, was not just in the naming of “partials”, but also in the naming of “fulls”. We need to clarify both halves, as it were.
From here on, I vow to use the following:
Partial parallels: the old category, consists of:
- Resembling parallels: Texts that have aspects in common, where these cannot be further specified by IDs; eg MN 10 and MN 119.
- Sectional parallels: Where a “section” of one text can be specified as parallel with a “section” of another. A “section” is anything definable by ID’s, up to and including the whole text.
When a partial parallel is specified by IDs and becomes a sectional parallel, it is then usually a type of full parallel. Of course, it’s possible to have texts that are “resembling sectional parallels”!
Ideally we can eliminate the old “partial” category completely.
In addition, we need to distinguish between:
- Full parallels: Texts that have much in common, such that they appear to be different versions of the same “thing”.
- Whole parallels: A parallel that relates to the “whole” of a text, rather than one section of it. To this we might add:
- Ranging parallels: Where a parallel applies across two or more texts.
Thus “full/resembling” is one pair, based on the closeness of the relationship, and “section/whole/ranging” is another set, based on the extent of the related passage.
Okay, so now we can name the two different sections of the details pages; that is, the first part, with “whole” parallels, and the second, with “sectional” (i.e. bookmarked) parallels.
We could use a <th> to define: “Parallels of the whole text” and “Parallels of a section of the text”.
Note that the application of “ranging” parallels is the bug I noted earlier, where, when such parallels are the root text, our details page lacks a caption.