Footnotes or comment? On the function of explanations in scientific edition

Abstract

The article is an attempt to describe various meanings of the terms “footnote” and “comment”. Footnotes are presented as biographical notes occurring primarily in scientific texts, which refer to the sources of citations and the studies mentioned. They constitute text which is of secondary status in relation to the main discourse, and often contains polemics with the views by other scholars. A comment, on the other hand, is not a necessary part of a scientific publication, since some text editions do not require explanations. Commenting, in addition, is not among the most important editorial actions, since an editor’s primary task is an analysis of messages which leads to establishing the proper form of a text. Doubts of this sort concerning the role of a comment, however, disappear in the case of publishing texts from remote past, which require knowledge possessed by few readers. The article also contains theoretical elaborations on the role, character and form of comments and footnotes in editing (the issues analyzed are, among others: the length of a commentary, explanations vs. the reader, most frequent mistakes made by editors in the course of formulating explanations, the role of explanations in egodocuments). Much emphasis is placed on the role of footnotes in the world of electronic media (the shape of explanations in digital editions: the possibility to introduce iconographic elements, using moving pictures and sound, or a comment as a collection of “lexies”).