[tei-council] the pdf guidelines, a battle not a war

[Lou's Laptop]

James Cummings wrote:
>
> I don't know if I'm just being overly pedantic (what, who, me?) but are we 
> being presentationally dishonest in providing a full citation after an example?
>
>   
I think, yes, you are being a bit pedantic, but it raises quite an 
important and interesting question as to the status of examples in the 
Guidelines and elsewhere.

As you rightly suggest, the vast majority (possibly even all) of the 
examples in the Guidelines are not quoted directly from previously 
tagged works, but instead represent (sometimes several) ways in which 
parts of some pre-existing work might or should be tagged. It had never 
occurred to me before now that this was not entirely obvious, but 
clearly we need to state it, if only to avoid the misconception that you 
draw attention to.

For me the important point here is that the examples demonstrate how to 
encode real texts rather than stuff made up for the purpose. This keeps 
us honest, and also imposes the need to cite a source, so that the 
skeptic may go and determine for themselves whether or not the proposed 
tagging makes sense in context. And it shows that one USP of the 
Guidelines is their ability to mark up (readings of) real, pre-existing 
text, with all their complexity, rather than just provide markup for 
materials born digital.

I don't honestly know whether the community of established TEI practice 
is yet sufficiently mature or stable enough that it would be helpful to 
include examples of how *in practice* people use TEI for a wide range of 
materials. I was rather hoping that the TEI By Example project might 
answer that question, but its agenda seems to be slightly different -- 
it uses made up examples, and such extracts as I have read so far 
suggest that it is purely didactic, rather than exploratory, in its 
coverage of encoding practice.

I don't there are any cases in the Guidelines where we cite an existing 
TEI encoded text. It's kind of a boot strapping problem!

Lou