[tei-council] divliminality

[Lou Burnard]

Thanks for the comments Kevin.  Your point about adding something about 
the real benefits of contribution is a good one: care to suggest some 
wording?



On 18/10/13 20:03, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> I think Lou was originally asking for suggestions on revising his email.
>    A few notes interspersed below ...
>
> On 10/17/13 11:19 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> 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?
> The phrase "that thing" is awkward here because it doesn't have a clear
> antecedent.  Only when you read on does the reader realize that you're
> referring to "the challenge" ... or various instances of it.
>
> 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! .
> Okay, now it's becoming clear that, with the confusing sentence above,
> this constitutes someone's train of thought.  It needs to be set off
> somehow to make this clear.
>
> 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.
> I think we need to mention again the very real benefit to people that
> the Council will clarify the Guidelines so that the Guidelines will be
> less contradictory and clearer for readers, leading to more consistently
> encoded texts.
>
> --K.