[tei-council] divliminality

[Lou Burnard]

A glance at the agenda confirms that my guilty conscience is as ever 
correct in saying I have failed to do something or other. So here 
follows the text of an email we could send to TEI-L if Council approves 
it and we wish to continue with this exercise. We need to decide on an 
email address to receive the thousands of candidate encodings, and we 
need to set up a website with the originals and minimal transcripts 
proposed. I am happy to provide the input for the latter, but not sure 
about the former.

-----------------

TAKE THE TEI DIV/LIMINAL/ TAGGING CHALLENGE!

Everyone knows how to tag TEI texts. You mark paragraphs, lists, line of 
verse, and headings, wrapped up in divisions, wrapped up in texts. No 
problem. But there's an interesting challenge lurking at the edges of 
most sub-divisions of most texts printed before about 1800, when 
printing conventions were in the process of being stabilised. What 
exactly /is/ that thing? It can't be a heading -- we already had one of 
them. It might be a salutation? Or maybe a dateline? No, it's an 
epigraph! . Hmm. The TEI has quite a vocabulary for the little snippets 
that can appear at the top of a division, before things start, and the 
similar snippets that appear at the end when it's all over... and those 
are the elements which make up the divLiminal class [1]. Trying to apply 
that vocabulary consistently and clearly to the complexity and richness 
of real texts is what the divliminal challenge is all about.


We thought it might be useful and possibly even fun to crowdsource the 
problem of improving on the TEI's currently rather inconsistent rules. 
So we have gathered from the almost limitless depths of the EEBO TCP 
corpus a fine collection of tops and bottoms, and we are now launching 
the Divliminal Challenge, for members of the TEI community (that's you) 
to propose how they should be tagged. We'll respect your anonymity, and 
you can do as many taggings as you like; even the same one more than 
once (as long as you do it differently). You can use any valid 
combination of TEI tags (valid against TEI ALL, that is), or if you 
think that's impossible, you can propose a different tagging, using tags 
from your own namespace.


    How does it work?

 1.

    Take a look at the site http://www.tei-c.org/divliminal you'll see a
    list of Tops and Bottoms, identified by number, with a small
    graphic, and a number telling you how many encodings exist for this
    top or bottom so far.

 2.

    If you're not discouraged, select one or more of them and consider
    how you think it should be tagged.

 3.

    You can download a minimally tagged version of each Top or Bottom.
    Download the ones that interest you, and work them up to perfection
    using Oxygen or your favourite TEI editor.

 4.

    Send us your file, making sure not to lose the identifying
    information, and of course adding your name (or pseudonym) to the
    respStmt in the header.


    What's in it for me?

Well nothing much, to be honest, unless of course you are the sort of 
person who enjoys marking up texts in TEI. And of course, we will be 
maintaining (and prominently displaying) a list of Top Taggers so if 
you're looking for kudos, you'll get that too.


[1]Latinists will know that "liminal" is derived from "limen", a 
threshold ; anthropologists will associate it with the concept of 
/liminality /"the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in 
the middle stage of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rituals>a ritual" 
according to Wikipedia.We just mean "something that's on the edge, 
either before or after the main event".