[tei-council] [Fwd: Humanites E-Book]

Daniel Paul O'Donnell daniel.odonnell at gmail.com
Tue Oct 20 17:07:19 EDT 2009


I think the way forward may be to continue with what Lou 
suggests--investigate the difference, and then if Council feels it is 
worthwhile doing, advise the Board that they would like us to approach 
them boardo-a-boardo with a proposal for bringing them back into the fold.

So in short, it seems to me that Council should formulate and propose a 
course of action and then we can get started at the Board level. The 
idea of affiliations and cooperation more generally came up at the last 
Board meeting, although we were talking more generally about what 
Laurent calls "political" affiliations rather than technical ones. But 
we have lots of experience with technical cooperation and this seems to 
me like a really good one.

-dan

David Sewell wrote:
> My press director, it turns out, doesn't know the Humanities E-Book
> directors terribly well (met them once, like myself). So... if we want
> to raise with them the issue of having their texts TEI P5-compliant, it
> probably falls to Council or Board to approach them. As I believe Lou
> discovered, technical details of their encoding practice are available
> on their website,
>
> http://www.humanitiesebook.org/xml-books.html
>
> (White Paper No. 1 discusses at some length the derivation of their DTD
> from TEI Lite.)
>
> Dan, is this something for Board to discuss?
>
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Lou Burnard wrote:
>
>   
>> Thanks David for this excellent suggestion.
>>
>> Meanwhile, i think it would be useful to start work on seeing just how
>> close to being a pure TEI subset the dtd actually is, modulo a few tag
>> renamings.... I'm happy to look into that next week.
>>
>> Lou
>>
>> David Sewell wrote:
>>     
>>> All,
>>>
>>> There are indeed political considerations here, and we need to proceed
>>> sensitively.
>>>
>>> Earlier this year, the ACLS Humanities E-Book folks put together a
>>> proposal to expand their system so that the broad range of publishers
>>> represented by the AAUP (Association of American University Presses,
>>> which covers US + Canada plus publishers with branches here, like Oxford
>>> and Cambridge) could include all sorts of monographs within that system.
>>> I have not been directly involved in talks about that, but the director
>>> of U of Virginia Press has. She also knows the directors of ACLS
>>> Humanities E-Book, Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto, better than I do (I
>>> was one a panel with them once). In addition, she is a past president of
>>> the AAUP.
>>>
>>> Let me suggest that I ask Penny whether she would feel comfortable
>>> raising with them on our (TEI Council's) behalf the concern about
>>> compatibility with TEI P5 and the offer to collaborate on mapping. We
>>> can put this in the context of increasing use of TEI as an archival and
>>> publishing standard, and the desirability of avoiding "orphan"
>>> implementations of TEI. At the same time we need to recognize that the
>>> ACLS has a viable, longstanding, working publication platform, and I
>>> would hope that we can extend an offer of collaboration without seeming
>>> too colonial ("bringing the light of P5 civilisation to the quaint
>>> tribal cultures").
>>>
>>> Does that make sense?
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Lou wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I agree 100% that this is the right course of action from the Council's
>>>> point of view.
>>>>
>>>> There remains the political question of how this disagreeable state of
>>>> affairs came into being but we probably don't want to discuss that here.
>>>>
>>>> Gabriel Bodard wrote:
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>>> It would be great to learn more about that "local practice" so that it
>>>>> can be mapped to P5 (and/or, perhaps in some cases, P5 adapted to admit it).
>>>>>
>>>>> (He says, speaking from EpiDoc experience of turning a _highly_
>>>>> customized P4 DTD into a fully conformant P5 schema.)
>>>>>
>>>>> G
>>>>>
>>>>> Lou Burnard a écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>>>> I received the following from Kevin and am meditating a reply.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>>>>> Subject: Humanites E-Book
>>>>>> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:59:28 +0100
>>>>>> From: Kevin Hawkins <kevin.s.hawkins at ultraslavonic.info>
>>>>>> To: Lou Burnard <lou.burnard at oucs.ox.ac.uk>, "Paul F. Schaffner"
>>>>>> <PFSchaffner at umich.edu>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Per the conversation at Council that Paul mentioned to me, Humanities
>>>>>> E-book requires publishers to provide XML in a format that my
>>>>>> predecessors defined for them.  It's derived from the Text Class DTD
>>>>>> used in DLXS, which in turn is derived from TEI Lite P3, with local
>>>>>> practice grafted on top.
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>> tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>>>>>> http://lists.village.Virginia.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>>>>>>
>>>>>>             
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>>>>
>>>>         
>>>       
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>>     
>
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/




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