question

[Syd Bauman]

Has no one responded to this yet?

<p>> maybe this is something for the agenda tomorrow: 

Sadly this wasn't in time to be discussed at length; many of us did
not get to read your mail until after the meeting.

<p>> A group of German historians are considering to develop a dtd for
> the transcription of historical sources. They want to collaborate
> with the TEI. As far as I can see, this is very much in the
> beginning, but it poses a general question: how to cooperate in the
> most fruitful way. Is the TEI generally trying to cooperate as
> closely as possible in order to incorporate special demands like
> this into the TEI recommendations?

I have no idea of our official policies, if any, in this area. But
IMHO we probably don't want to get too tangled up into special-
purpose "demands" (although providing consulting is another issue
being considered by a Council committee), but the transcription of
historical sources doesn't seem all that special-purpose to me. Not
that I've ever read a German historian's historical source, but it
seems like, in general, we'd like to support use of TEI by historians
just as much as we support it's use by literature scholars. (In fact,
"historical analysis and interpretation" is listed as an area for
expected future work, although I have to admit I'm not certain what
that means. See the last few paragraphs of Chapter 1.)

<p>> They asked me some special questions which I have to forward to you: 
> - How are new working groups established?

Council decides.

<p>> - Is there a level of discussion of TEI extensions more formally
> than the discussion lists, but not as formally as the working
> groups?

I think the answer is "no", but I would like TEI-TECH to become, if
not more formal, at least more in-depth place for exactly such
discussions. Searchable archives do exist for both TEI-L (theorhet-
ically non-technical, but lots of technical discussions occur, which
is fine) and TEI-TECH.

<p>> As the proposed work is rather in the domain of the TEI section on
> the "Transcription of Primary Sources" I guess they also want to
> know how to cooperate with a working group.

Pobably show up at a working group meeting with a case of local
German beer :-) 
Seriously, if there is a working group, there already are rules for
guests if I recall correctly (I will get to EDW54 shortly ...). If we
don't have a working group for what an outside group wants, it seems
to me we should encourage them to petition the Council for such a
working group, preferably with funding.

<p>> A more general idea in this context: Should the TEI offer to host
> extensions to the TEI (which use the extension mechanism) which
> have been developed by some project? In projects like perl the
> module archive does offer everybody working with perl access to
> tested code and some modules are becoming part of the standard
> distribution after a while. On the other side: Maybe the extensions
> are most of the time so specific that they wouldn't be worthwhile
> sharing.

While I can see lots of details that need to be worked out (do we
review the extensions or certify them "compliant"? Do we provide the
files themselves or just pointers? Do we include changes to the TEI
DTDs that are not done properly via extension files? Do we require
documentation of any extensions we include? Not to mention the
wording of the disclaimer), I think this is an excellent idea.

<p>Sorry you weren't able to make it to London.