I find this a really interesting issue, and one which hadn’t really come to the fore with much force (yet) in my own edition, as I’ve been focussed on quite tangible references (people, places, publishers, books) within a set of letters rather than being on the more slippery terrain of literary allusions.

I don’t really have an answer to the specific coding questions you’re asking, but what did occur to me as I read your post is that it’s not all about the responsibility of the coder. There are ways to query corpora that can bring out references, say, to Biblical allusions. If you happened to catch the paper at DHSI on topic modelling Martha Ballard’s diary then that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of – it’s possible that at some point in the future there might be a sophisticated enough topic modeller that would pick up these references, even when couched in metaphorical language as the examples you’ve chosen are. Even a regular old lexical analysis might bring out an interesting discourse prosody around words connected to sacrifice which the reader could then pursue further.

(Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of how far to go as an editor in marking up the text in a nuanced way … just throws in another thing to consider in relation to the ‘participatory relationship between reader and text’!)

Anouk