[tei-council] Council meeting in April - Symposium on 11. April

[Laurent Romary]

Dear all,
As a kind of now long-standing tradition within the council (initiated  
by Christian Wittern, if I'm not wrong), we will start our meeting in  
Chicago with a one-day symposium on 11. April on the following topic:  
"Representation, Preservation, and Interchange : Have We Fulfilled the  
Poughkeepsie Principles?". Kevin and I have started to brainstorm on  
this and would like to suggest the following out line for presenting  
this event:

<quote>
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was formed in 1987 to develop  
guidelines for the encoding and interchange of machine-readable texts,  
hoping to overcome the difficulties of moving content across hardware  
and software platforms. Its development was guided by the Poughkeepsie  
Principles, which articulated the vision for the TEI, which would give  
guidelines on how to represent text in digital form and preserve it in  
a non-proprietary format which would facilitate data interchange.

In the nearly 25 years since then, the TEI has seen wide adoption as a  
recommended format for representing and preserving digital text.   
While interchange of TEI files has generally become seamless, but  
interchange of content itself is still difficult due to great  
variation in local practice and flexibility in application of the  
Guidelines.  And while the TEI community has long evangelized about  
the power of structured markup, we find that the information  
retrieval, digital preservation, and publishing communities have to  
various extents declined to embrace use rich structured markup in  
favor of simpler solutions.

Has the TEI not yet fulfilled the Poughkeepsie Principles?  Why are  
people adopting or developing other solutions besides the TEI?  Do we  
suffer image problems, a lack of visibility, high barriers to entry?   
Is explicit representation of structure irrelevant today?
</quote>

We would think of inviting there various people which could provide us  
with food for thought for our future work. Part of the names result  
from their geographical proximity, hence making their presence more  
probable: John Wilkin, Thomas Schmidt, Martin Mueller, Jeff Beck, Mark  
Olsen, plus a report by Kevin on the Best Practices for TEI in  
libraries.

Do not hesitate to come back to me and Kevin with further ideas.
Laurent



Laurent Romary
INRIA & HUB-IDSL
laurent.romary at inria.fr