[tei-council] First Draft Press Release (for immediate comment, please)

[Dan O'Donnell]

Hi all,

Our Communications person will be coming round to go over this draft
press release in a couple of hours. He'll than take it away for his
fairies to work on for the rest of the afternoon before we release it.

It's obviously important that the raw material he works with be good,
accurate and complete: I'd really appreciate anybody who can spare some
time taking a look at this and emailing back any complete blunders I've
made or features/points I should be making in the press release.

The target audience for this release is the scholarly community: XML
cognoscenti but also scholars with less digital knowledge but interest
in the topic. It is neither a teaching document nor a technical spec,
but rather a kind of "bet you didn't know" document.

Although this is primarily a board matter, nobody knows the guidelines
better than the editors and the current council, so I appreciate
comments from anybody on either.

-dan

==========
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


The Text Encoding Initiative announces the release of a major new
edition of its XML standard Guidelines for the encoding of scholarly
texts: P5 version 1.0. 


This new release thoroughly revises previous editions and adds many new
features to assist scholars in their research. Among the changes are:

      * New support for manuscript description, multimedia and graphics,
        standoff annotation, and representation of data pertaining to
        people and places
        
      * Improvements in the representation of abbreviations,
        corrections, and other textual alterations and alternatives
        
      * The introduction of simpler mechanisms for linking and pointing
        to other documents
        
      * A complete revision in the methods used for handling languages
        and character sets
        

TEI P5 version 1.0 is also the first edition of the Guidelines to take
full advantage of the power of XML schema languages. As a result, users
can now

      * Perform far more rigorous validation than has ever been
        possible, including new support for the validation of datatypes
        on attribute values
        
      * Use elements drawn from other XML tagsets, such as MathML or
        Docbook within a TEI document
        
      * Embed TEI-encoded texts in other types of XML documents, such as
        METS and MODS records 
        
      * More easily create, maintain, and document user customizations
        


Despite these changes, TEI P5 Version 1.0 also maintains all of the
features that have made to the Guidelines the premiere standard for
scholarly text encoding over the last 20 years:

      * Free availability on the Web and under improved (GNU General
        Public License, version 2) Licencing
        
      * A modular architecture that is even more easy to customise or
        extend
        
      * A large number of finely nuanced elements suitable for encoding
        almost any structural textual feature
        


About the TEI
The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is an international organization
whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital
encoding of literary and linguistic texts. The Consortium publishes the
Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange: an international and interdisciplinary standard that is
widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars
to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and
teaching.

The TEI is supported by annual dues from institutional members and
individual subscribers, with additional funding from grants and the
institutional support of its hosts. Its chief activities include the
publication and ongoing development of the TEI Guidelines, and support
for their use with schema development tools, training and documentation
initiatives, discussion forums, and an annual conference.

The TEI community is broad-based and international in scope, including
members in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia and users at
hundreds of universities, libraries, research units, and businesses
worldwide. The materials encoded with the TEI Guidelines are as various
as its practitioners, spanning the breadth of the humanities and social
sciences and occasional usage in the scientific community as well. In
addition to wide adoption in digital libraries, the TEI is used to
represent manuscripts, research papers, historical archives, early
printed books, linguistic corpora, anthologies, critical editions,
ancient inscriptions, and a wealth of other literary, historical, and
cultural material. The scope of the TEI is constantly expanding and the
Guidelines are in steady ongoing development to keep pace with the
emerging needs of the TEI community.


-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/