emphasesfrom

Emphasesfrom is a term used in textual criticism and digital humanities to denote that the emphasis observed in a passage originates from the source text rather than being introduced by the editor. It functions as a marker or annotation indicating provenance of emphatic focus, rather than a stylistic choice made in the edited text.

The word blends emphasis with from, signaling that the highlighted words or phrases reflect the original author’s emphasis. It is seen in scholarly markup and annotation schemes, particularly in critical editions, transcription projects, and digital corpora where the goal is to preserve and track the transmission of emphasis across texts. The term is informal in many circles but has gained traction as part of metadata practices that document editorial decisions and source relationships.

In practice, emphasesfrom may be encoded as a metadata attribute or inline tag within a digital edition. For example, an editor might annotate a quoted clause with emphasesfrom="Source text: Hamlet, act 3, scene 1" to indicate that the emphasis pattern follows the original play. In scholarly databases, it can be used to filter passages whose emphasis is inherited from cited sources, distinguishing them from editor-imposed emphasis.

Limitations include varying conventions across projects and the lack of universal standards for encoding such provenance. As a result, emphasesfrom is primarily a descriptive aid for researchers tracking emphasis across textual networks rather than a universally adopted editorial instruction.

See also: quotation, emphasis, annotation, textual criticism, markup languages.