3.492 TEI -- how to get involved (146)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Mon, 25 Sep 89 22:06:55 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 492. Monday, 25 Sep 1989.
Date: 25 September 1989 17:17:04 CDT
From: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen 312 996-2477 -2981" <U35395@UICVM>
Subject: Text Encoding Initiative -- how to lend a hand
In his report from Oxford, Willard mentions the Text Encoding
Initiative, observing--quite correctly--that it welcomes participation
in the effort at all levels and hoping for a description of the levels
of participation possible.
How could we refuse such an invitation?
LEVEL ZERO: Subscribe to TEI-L @ UICVM
TEI-L is a Listserv discussion list (just like Humanist) concerned with
text encoding in general and the TEI in particular. To use it, you
need to know only how to use your local electronic mail facilities to
send and receive messages--which, as a good Humanist, you already do.
Use them to send a message to the address (mutatis mutandis) LISTSERV @
UICVM. The message you contain will be processed by the LISTSERV
program itself, rather than any human agency, and so must conform to the
following strict syntax:
SUBSCRIBE TEI-L XXX
In place of XXX you should write two or more words by which you wish to
identified on messages you send out. Thus, for example:
SUBSCRIBE TEI-L Emmanuel A. Smorgasborg
ListServ won't care what name you use--though other subscribers might.
It is customary to use your own name. If you want to see who else is
currently subscribed, send another message which reads:
REVIEW TEI-L
LEVEL 1: AIR YOUR VIEWS ON TEI-L
TEI-L has been set up to enable you to raise specific questions about
text encoding problems and to provide a channel for discussion about (for
example) what can or should be tagged in text, and what cannot or should
not. We see it as a subdivision of HUMANIST--though deplorably short of
Willard's. If you are worried about a specific problem, whether it be
literary allusion or the encoding of coffee stains on a papyrus, we want
you to expatiate first on TEI-L.
LEVEL 2: ENLIST!
As you probably know by now, the TEI has four working committees, each
of which is responsible for producing a draft set of guidelines by early
next year. That work will involve significant amounts of effort in
drafting and reviewing, quite apart from the intellectual demands
involved in proposing tag sets for the whole spectrum of scholarly
research which is the TEI's brief. Volunteers to read and comment in
detail on drafts proposed for a specific area are particularly needed.
The four committees and the subcommittees with which they are beginning
their work have been described before on Humanist. To refresh the
collective memory, however, we recapitulate below.
Committee on TEXT DOCUMENTATION: tags for identifying the source (copy
text) of an electronic text, tags for bibliographic identification of the
electronic version itself, and other text-level labeling. No subgroups.
Head: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, U35395 @ UICVM or U35395 @ UICVM.UIC.EDU
Committee on TEXT REPRESENTATION: tags for representing texts and
textual features for which typographic or manuscript conventions exist.
First targets: common text types, alphabetic languages (notably those
of the EEC, Hebrew). Head: Stig Johansson, H_JOHANSSON%USE.UIO.UNINETT
@ CERNVAX or stig @ norunit
Subfields:
Character sets and transliteration schemes (Steven DeRose, Summer
Institute of Linguistics, D106GFS @ UTARLVM1)
Literary texts, including epic, poems, novels, drama (Elli Mylonas,
Harvard University, Project Perseus, ELLI @ HARVUNXW)
Historical sources and other structured texts, including apparatus
criticus, data representation (Manfred Thaller, Max-Planck-
Institut fuer Geschichte, Goettingen, MTHALLE @ DGOGWDG1)
Technical, scientific, and office documents (Roberto Cencioni,
Commission of the European Communities,
Roberto_Cencioni_EUROTRA_CEC @ eurokom.ie)
Corpora of linguistic samples like the Brown or LOB corpora
(Stig Johansson, University of Oslo, see addresses above)
Philosophical texts (Allen Renear, Brown University, ALLEN @ BROWNVM)
Religious texts (Robin Cover, Dallas Theological Seminary, ZRCC1001 @
SMUVM1)
Problems common to many text types (David Chesnutt, University of
South Carolina, N330004 @ UNIVSCVM)
Committee on TEXT ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION: tags for information
of interest to research but for which no specific typographic or
manuscript conventions are well established. First target: linguistic
tagging at sub-sentential level.
Subfields:
Phonology (William Poser, Stanford, poser @ crystals.stanford.edu)
Morphology (Steven Anderson, Johns Hopkins, anderson @ cs.jhu.edu)
Dictionaries (Robert Amsler, Bellcore, amsler @ flash.bellcore.com)
Lexicon, esp. tagging of running texts at lexical level
(Robert Ingria, BBN) -- these may function as a dictionary /
lexicon subcommittee headed by Amsler and Ingria
Syntax: tags for delimiting phrase structures etc. (Mitch Marcus,
Pennsylvania, mitch @ linc.cis.upenn.edu)
Committee on METALANGUAGE and SYNTAX ISSUES: specification of the exact
form of SGML to be used in the TEI guidelines, and development of a
metalanguage for the formal description of encoding schemes. No
subcommittees. Head: David T. Barnard, Queen's University, Kingston,
Ont., barnard @ qucis.queensu.ca
If you want to help, you should first check the list above to see which
committee is of most relevance to your interests and expertise and then
get in touch with the contact person named there. (A fuller form of
this list, describing the current overall organisation of the TEI
project and specifying responsibilities and contact persons for all of
its committees and subcommittees, will be available from TEI-L and also
from the Humanist Fileserver). If the list doesn't help, then please
get in touch with the nearest Editor or Committee Head.
If you have already tried to get involved with the TEI and heard
nothing, please bear with us for a while. You should hear from someone
very shortly.
In closing --
The TEI is an undertaking of the textual computing community in general,
not of a small coterie. Its results will be only as good and complete
as the work of that community makes possible. And the areas best
developed in the encoding guidelines produced by the TEI will be those
which have attracted the most work.
-Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Lou Burnard
Editors, ACH / ACL / ALLC Text Encoding Initiative
University of Illinois at Chicago, Oxford University Computing Service