The Exhibition Problem. A Real-life Example with a Suggested Solution

Abstract

As the number of scholarly encoded digital texts is increasing, creating models of these kinds of texts with the help of digital tools is becoming more and more interesting. In connection with this type of work, it is important to have a clear understanding of what these particular models are based on. They will clearly be based on certain readings of the source texts, but we need to keep track of the relationships between the texts, readings of the texts and the models based on such readings. In this article, a problem of potentially great significance for this kind of modelling is discussed. The problem is called the exhibition problem and is based on the difference in ordinary linguistic communication between asserting a fact, e.g. that a certain person has a certain name, and exhibiting the same fact. In many cases, the latter is modelled as if it was the former. As a solution to this problem, an event-oriented modelling method is proposed.