Textual History of Unpunctuated Speech

[walshbr]

Once the thing is working, it'd be interesting to do a kind of bibliographic study of the punctuation marks / unquoted speech. It occurred to me that choosing whichever edition/printing of the text we run through the script would make a big difference. And punctuation marks tend to be the things that get corrected/regularized over time, so far as my experience with editing has taught me. Those sort of things seem easy to track - you look for changes in the marks. I wonder if we could use the script to track editorial changes made to unpunctuated speech? Not really sure what that means or what it would look like, but could be interesting.

[walshbr]

And as evidence to support the above suggestion, I just found this in an article on Woolf's punctuation:

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In one place, the directed revision apparently so mystified Harcourt
that in order to include it Harcourt changed an indirect quotation to a
direct quotation. On page 142 of the proof sheets the sentence reads:
"Communication is health; communication is happiness." Virginia
Woolf deleted the period, replacing it with a comma, and added the
sentence "Communication he muttered." If followed exactly, the revision
would read:
Communication ishealth; comunication is happiness, Communication he
muttered.
Harcourt (p. 141) deals with the problem by turning it into a direct
quotation of one sentence and adding a dash:
"Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication-"
he muttered.
Hogarth (p. 142) stays closer to the original by simply transposing the
comma:
Communication is health; communication ishappiness. Communication,
he muttered