8.0013 TEI Guidelines Published (1/225)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Mon, 16 May 1994 20:40:52 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0013. Monday, 16 May 1994.

Date: Mon, 16 May 94 12:10:29 CDT
From: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <U35395@UICVM>
From: Lou Burnard <lou@vax.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: TEI Guidelines published


Subscribers of this list will, I hope, be interested in the following
announcement; please feel free to re-post it to other appropriate
lists and groups. Thanks. -CMSMcQ

-----

TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE PUBLISHES GUIDELINES

On May 16, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) publishes its
"Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange."

This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred
experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient
Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic
text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of
computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The
format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial
software packages.

The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly
incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse
of data among researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts
is an expensive and time-consuming business. The object of the TEI was
to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful
even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete.
This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly
evolving computer industry.

To make them "future-proof", the TEI Guidelines use an international
standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized
Markup Language. SGML was originally developed by the publishing
industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of
electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software
developers, publishers, and government agencies. It is one of the
enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take
shape.

The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in
use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as
teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals.
They must be both easily extensible and easily simplified. And their
aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in
all languages and writing systems, from any period in history.

Consequently, the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for
the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama, and other
performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic
research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks.

The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of
electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These
specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic
texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed
texts.

The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added
to the set of basic recommendations. These include methods for encoding
hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts),
representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates,
representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing
of texts for corpus-linguistic study. The Guidelines also define
methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and
commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity.


The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant
support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities,
Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the
volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share
their experience in using computers and to work out the specific
recommendations in the Guidelines.

The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the
area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association
for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics,
which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and
researchers worldwide.

Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their
intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large
scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the
world of humanities scholarship.

The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the
Internet. For more information contact the TEI editors by e-mail at
tei@uic.edu or lou@vax.ox.ac.uk. Orders may be placed at the TEI offices
in Chicago, Oxford or Chiba, addresses of which follow:

In Europe: TEI Orders, Oxford University Computing Services,
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK
fax +44 865 273275

In East Asia: Prof. Syun Tutiya, Department of Philosophy
Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho Inage-ku
Chiba 263, Japan
fax: +81 43 290 2287

Rest Of World: C. M. Sperberg McQueen, University of Illinois at
Chicago, Academic Computing Center (M/C 135), 1940 W. Taylor,
Rm. 124, Chicago IL 60612-7352, USA
Return-Path: <@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU:LISTSERV@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Received: from BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@BROWNVM) by
BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 5793; Mon,
16 May 1994 13:09:02 -0400
Return-Path: <@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU:U35395@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU>
Received: from UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU (NJE origin MAILER@UICVM) by BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU
(LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 5790; Mon, 16 May 1994 13:08:58 -0400
Received: from UICVM (NJE origin U35395@UICVM) by UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU (LMail
V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4877; Mon, 16 May 1994 12:12:32 -0500
Date: Mon, 16 May 94 12:10:29 CDT
From: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <U35395@UICVM>
Organization: ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative
Subject: TEI Guidelines published
To: Humanist Computing Support Discussion List <HUMANIST@BROWNVM>


Subscribers of this list will, I hope, be interested in the following
announcement; please feel free to re-post it to other appropriate
lists and groups. Thanks. -CMSMcQ

-----

TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE PUBLISHES GUIDELINES

On May 16, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) publishes its
"Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange."

This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred
experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient
Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic
text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of
computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The
format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial
software packages.

The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly
incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse
of data among researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts
is an expensive and time-consuming business. The object of the TEI was
to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful
even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete.
This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly
evolving computer industry.

To make them "future-proof", the TEI Guidelines use an international
standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized
Markup Language. SGML was originally developed by the publishing
industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of
electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software
developers, publishers, and government agencies. It is one of the
enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take
shape.

The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in
use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as
teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals.
They must be both easily extensible and easily simplified. And their
aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in
all languages and writing systems, from any period in history.

Consequently, the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for
the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama, and other
performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic
research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks.

The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of
electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These
specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic
texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed
texts.

The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added
to the set of basic recommendations. These include methods for encoding
hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts),
representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates,
representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing
of texts for corpus-linguistic study. The Guidelines also define
methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and
commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity.


The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant
support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities,
Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the
volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share
their experience in using computers and to work out the specific
recommendations in the Guidelines.

The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the
area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association
for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics,
which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and
researchers worldwide.

Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their
intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large
scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the
world of humanities scholarship.

The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the
Internet. For more information contact the TEI editors by e-mail at
tei@uic.edu or lou@vax.ox.ac.uk. Orders may be placed at the TEI offices
in Chicago, Oxford or Chiba, addresses of which follow:

In Europe: TEI Orders, Oxford University Computing Services,
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK
fax +44 865 273275

In East Asia: Prof. Syun Tutiya, Department of Philosophy
Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho Inage-ku
Chiba 263, Japan
fax: +81 43 290 2287

Rest Of World: C. M. Sperberg McQueen, University of Illinois at
Chicago, Academic Computing Center (M/C 135), 1940 W. Taylor,
Rm. 124, Chicago IL 60612-7352, USA
fax: +1 312 668 6834