September 2023 - Tei-council

Next Stylesheets meeting: September 28
by Helena Bermúdez Sabel 22 Sep '23

22 Sep '23

Dear all, The next Stylesheets meeting is scheduled for September 28 at at 18:00Z (11:00 PDT, 14:00 EDT, 20:00 CEST). Here you have the suggested agenda <https://docs.google.com/document/d/11_l_MZ6M2lxhE2qtH6QUkZVxo0-OQrNgRhOnpaU…>, and as always, do not hesitate to add other topics/tickets to discuss. Best, H.

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A little update
by Elli Bleeker 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

Dear council members, First of all, I hope you're thoroughly enjoying the conference in Paderborn! I wanted to write to you with a quick update on my situation (as far as Elisa hasn't already filled you in). The past months have been, well, hard work, but I'm happy to report all is well with our new little family. The twins were born on March 17, two months too soon, and we had to stay in the hospital for three weeks, but since taking them home they've been doing great. Enclosed a picture for those interested. Still, it's been quite demanding to take care of newborn twins (who would've thought?) and so far I haven't had a chance to recover from the burn-out symptoms I experienced right before (and during) my pregnancy. So when Elisa wrote to me proposing I extend my leave from Council, thus not only giving me some more time to recover but also giving someone else the chance to experience Council for a year, I considered it a good solution. I was indeed very happy to hear that Joey has been a wonderful addition to Council and I'm glad this solution worked out so well. This is not to say I miss you very much and I wish I could be there in Paderborn with you. Starting this week, the twins are going to daycare, giving me some much needed time to rest and get better. For now, I wish you an interesting, productive and overall great conference and members meeting. All best, Elli [image: image.png]

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Fwd: Mailing List Change of Address
by Elisa Beshero-Bondar 04 Sep '23

04 Sep '23

Council: I'm forwarding this e-mail exchange recently with Martin Mueller who has some ideas for us to get more involved with university libraries. Elisa ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, Sep 3, 2023 at 11:28 PM Subject: Re: Mailing List Change of Address To: Martin Mueller <martinmueller(a)northwestern.edu> Hi Martin, Thanks for your thoughtful messages, including the one about what we're currently calling "New Light" or "Lite 2" in Council. (You'll have more to read as we get our minutes posted--it's turning into a fascinating conceptual project.) Some of our discussion has been about studying how librarians understand metadata (including those who don't use the TEI very much) in order to put forward a streamlined version of the teiHeader, I will say that Penn State's IT are good generous people, and Listserv a remarkably robust and well-maintained software used by many universities in the US--and the transfer work was entirely pleasant and remarkably easy as a result. Libraries had little to do with that development in particular. Curriculum is another matter--I agree that it would be lovely to connect the Big Ten with TEI, but I suspect the real bottleneck is faculty teaching undergraduates. Some of us do, but we're a patchy network I think. Markup theory and practice needs to be taught to more grad students for this to catch on as canonical in curricula, but I think it certainly does teach remarkably well and appeals to students for what you can make and build of it--as you say, a sort of "maker space." TCP is certainly an important project to celebrate for bringing institutions together with a common goal, and it certainly does make for a good starting point for discussions about TEI in academe. Cheers from Paderborn, Elisa On Sat, Sep 2, 2023 at 9:36 PM Martin Mueller < martinmueller(a)northwestern.edu> wrote: > Dear Elisa, > > > > This is promising news. I take it somewhere at Penn State there is an > institutional interest in the TEI and that you had something to do with it. > Penn State is part of the Big Ten. In the old days, when there were just > ten, the Big Ten Libraries formed a very productive alliance (called the > CIC), which among other things was responsible for the Text Creation > Partnership. Technically that was a collaboration between Michigan and > Oxford, but Michigan did the heavy lifting, and good deal of the money came > from CIC subscribing libraries. Mark Sandler, a Michigan librarian who > became the directory of the CIC Libraries initiative, negotiated the key > provision of the deal between Proquest and the TCP: that the text would > move into the public domain within five years of the completion of the > project. > > > > The TCP texts are arguably the most important and almost certainly the > largest collection of TEI-encoded texts. At one time the CIC libraries > provided significant financial support for the TEI. I haven’t seen a > budget report from the TEI, but to gather from the dwindling number of > institutional members and their average contributions, the budget must be > pretty shaky. I think there is a strong case to be made for the successor > of the CIC—the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Initiatives—to take an > active cross-institutional interest in the TEI. What would be chump change > to them would be significant support for the TEI. > > > > I enclose with this email two longish documents. One is a talk that I > gave as the keynote address at the 2012 Chicago Colloquium on Digital > Humanities and Computer Science, where I sketched a model of distributed > editorial work that would actively engage undergraduates in the > collaborative curation of our cultural heritage. The other is a report to > the Mellon Foundation about a number of steps towards building such a model. > > > > I have sometimes toyed with the acronym CHOCK for Cultural Heritage Object > Construction Kit. The TEI provides a key tool—perhaps the key tool for > such a kit. “Maker spaces” across many campuses, helped by network > technologies, can be the sites for working gradually and in quite loosely > coordinated ways towards a common goal. > > > > You are an editor and should find this model attractive. If you can get > enough librarians and faculty in the Big Ten Alliance to see how and why > the TEI matters for undergraduate education, the long-term support for the > TEI would be on pretty sound footing. > > > > Best wishes > > > > MM > > > > > > > > > > > > *From: *TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list < > TEI-L(a)LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU> on behalf of Elisa Beshero-Bondar < > ebbondar(a)GMAIL.COM> > *Date: *Saturday, September 2, 2023 at 4:24 AM > *To: *TEI-L(a)LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <TEI-L(a)LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU> > *Subject: *Mailing List Change of Address > > Greetings, esteemed list members! > > This TEI community listserv, like several others hosted at Brown > University, is about to change its address to Penn State University. We > hope you don't notice any significant difference when that happens! You > will automatically remain subscribed to the same lists. Mail from the list > will be sent to you from a lists.psu.edu > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/lists.psu.edu__;!!Dq0X2DkFhyF93HkjWTBQKhk…> > address instead of a listserv.brown.edu > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/listserv.brown.edu__;!!Dq0X2DkFhyF93HkjWT…> > address. You will, for the foreseeable future, be able to send mail to the > list using either the old listserv.brown.edu > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/listserv.brown.edu__;!!Dq0X2DkFhyF93HkjWT…> > or the new lists.psu.edu > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/lists.psu.edu__;!!Dq0X2DkFhyF93HkjWTBQKhk…> > address. However, you will want to update your bookmarks to the listserv > archives to the new address as soon as the change has occurred, which will > be announced here. > > > > The big day for listserv transfer is scheduled on October 19, 2023, and it > will be a team operation between Brown and Penn State IT. > > Elli Mylonas will continue the day-to-day management of the listserv, with > assistance from myself and Syd Bauman. > > > > Please let us know if you have questions or concerns about the transfer > operations. We'll be discussing this at the Annual General Meeting in > Paderborn soon, so we can talk about it in person if you're there for the > TEI-MEC conference. > > > > Cheers, > > Elisa, with Elli and Syd > > -- > > Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD > > TEI Technical Council Chair and member of the TEI Infrastructure Group > > Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of > Digital Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State > Erie, The Behrend College > > Development site: https://newtfire.org > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/newtfire.org/__;!!Dq0X2DkFhyF93HkjWTBQKh…> > > -- Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD TEI Technical Council Chair Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Development site: https://newtfire.org -- Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD TEI Technical Council Chair Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Development site: https://newtfire.org

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Fwd: More about TEI Lite
by Elisa Beshero-Bondar 04 Sep '23

04 Sep '23

Message from Martin Mueller to the TEI-L list, pertinent to our discussion of Lite 2. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Martin Mueller <martinmueller(a)northwestern.edu> Date: Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 6:44 PM Subject: More about TEI Lite To: <TEI-L(a)listserv.brown.edu> I read through the minutes of the Technical Council that discussed my proposal to phase out simplePrint and merge it into a new version of TEI Lite that includes the Processing Model. I was pleased by the thoughtfulness of the discussion. Much of it was given over to naming the child, and I have a half-serious suggestion about that. Why not rechristen Lite and All TEI200 and TEI600? TEI-All has not quite 600 elements, and a revised TEI Lite falls short of 200. But the names give you a good sense of scale. TEI600 has a lot of elements, and TEI 200 has quite a few. The names get you out of implicit and confusing value judgements about what is ‘lite’ or ‘simple’. It may sound too much like F150 or C300, but that’s another matter, and some might like it for that reason. I disagree a little with the comment that “the phrasing of 90% of the needs of 90% of the community” is “outdated”. Pareto distributions and other power laws are pretty universal in their application. “90 % of the needs of 90% of the users” is an excellent version of the 80/20 rule. If anything, progress over the past quarter century may mean that the rule applies even more now than it did when it was used in the preface to the first version of TEI Lite. I remember working on a moderately complex project some twenty years ago. It was SGML rather than XML, and validation told you that things didn’t work without telling you much about the where or what of the errors. It’s a mystery to me now how I got it to work, though I did. Since then, the access costs to working with any kind of XML have dropped sharply, and folks with very little previous experience can “ramp up” quickly to doing useful work. If you belong to that category of users, it’s probably a good idea to ask yourself whether you can solve your encoding problem within a space of 200 elements rather than 600, not to speak of adding your own customization. That takes us back to the Nobel Prize behavioural economist Richard Thayer, who argued that in most walks of life people make better decisions if given a limited number of standard choices, as long as they can opt out. We all like to think that our projects are special, but typically they are not that special. A friend of mine told me that in Medical School he learned that “when you hear hooves behind you think horses not zebras”. Physicians like “interesting cases”. Patients not so much. This is good advice much of the time, and especially for groups like the Technical Council. Any such group is likely to have a preponderance of geeks, and geeks are more interested in exciting, new, and technically challenging things. Steven Pinker in his recent book on writing has a whole chapter on the problem that the hardest thing for a writer is to imagine what the reader does not know. Geeks share this problem, and groups like the Technical Council need to remind themselves constantly about the need to countersteer and focus on what most users do or need most of the time. Ben Shneiderman observed that good software should have “low thresholds and high ceilings”. From the bread-and-butter perspective of a thriving TEI enterprise, lowering the threshold should remain a key goal. I’m not much of a TEI expert, but I am an expert on the attitudes and anxieties of the key user community of people in English departments and their neighbours. Quite a few years Jerry McGann equipped about TEI as an acronym for *terra incognita. *Alas, the quip may still apply. The TEI has man virtues, but preaching beyond the choir is not one of them. It would be a good idea for the Technical Council to apply the 80/20 rule in such a way that 80% of the work is done on lowering the thresholds. TEI-Publisher, the happy child of the TEI Simple project, has done a lot of good work on that front. But even there much of the documentation is not as successful as it might be in keeping mind what the reader does not know. I have on occasions argued for the need of a “Small Catechism” to accompany the “Grand Catechism” of the TEI Guidelines—a magnificent document in some ways but not reader-friendly in others. The most useful part of the Guidelines is Appendix C1—the easiest and quickest way to figure out where an element may or may not occur. Since Appendix must be based on a program, it should be possible and not very expensive to create a version that Is populated only by the most frequently used elements (TEI 200 or whatever you call it. >From one perspective you don’t this: it doesn’t tell you what you can’t get from the full version. On the other hand, a TEI200 catalogue of elements and their behaviours would give novice users a much better sense of the TEI architecture. -- Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD TEI Technical Council Chair Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Development site: https://newtfire.org

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