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

[Arianna Ciula]

Could some links be added at least to the guidelines?

I think automatic processing and validation of expression of dates and 
times thanks to mapping to W3C and ISO date formats should also be included.

Arianna

Dan O'Donnell wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~aciula/