[tei-council] divliminality

[James Cummings]

We could use council at tei-c.org which forwards to me, or we could 
ask DavidS to set up a new one directing to you perhaps?  That 
shouldn't be too problematic.

If you get the page of examples ready I'm happy to upload it to 
the website.

-James

On 17/10/13 16:19, Lou Burnard wrote:
> 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".
>
>
>


-- 
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford