Dear Elisa and Council,
Following up on our discussions in the F2F meeting in Buenos Aires I
would like to request establishing a task force to create a new,
substantially changed revision of the TEI Lite.
As agreed in BA, task force members will be as follows:
Helena Bermúdez-Sabel
Gustavo Fernandez Riva
Martina Scholger
Magdalena Turska
As for the organization of work, we are planning to meet in person in
January 2025, in my house in Poland.
Best regards,
Magdalena
Scope of the work and planned deliverables
TEI Lite 2.0 task force is dedicated to the creation of the new TEI
Lite schema and corresponding Guidelines with extended examples
section. These will be accompanied by implementations for the new
functionalities required for the schema processing and Guidelines
publication.
Rationale
Motivations for the new version of the TEI Lite are several.
First, its original dates back to 1996, later followed by a series of
updates varying in scope. The last substantial revision was made in
2006, at a time when both the technologies supporting XML processing
were not as developed, and, more importantly, consensus regarding
publication and interoperability of TEI-encoded texts was completely
lacking and implementation praxis varied hugely. Therefore TEI Lite
(and TEI) Guidelines for the most part pay no heed to processing and
publishing concerns, in particular rarely addressing encoding
strategies for composite, heterogeneous collections, focusing rather
on the "archive" function of the format, where effectively all
information is injected into a single TEI resource. The task force's
intention is to expand the horizon of the TEI Lite Guidelines, to
discuss recommended data modeling, organization and processing
practices for a broad range of real life uses. Especially the
processing part will make use of the TEI Processing Model,
non-existent yet when TEI Lite was last updated.
Second, despite decades of efforts from the TEI community, the
standard is still too often perceived as prohibitively complex, and
even the presence of TEI Lite with its reduced set of elements did not
amend the situation. One reason may be the fragmentary character of
existing resources to learn TEI from, both in terms of structure and
examples provided. Particularly the latter in the Guidelines are
usually missing the broader context, from the facsimile of the
original source to the complete TEI document to which they might
belong, therefore making it impossible for the users to analyze the
complete picture the Guidelines try to portray. Therefore, TEI Lite
aims to extend the base of full encoding examples as well as
illustrate remaining fragmentary ones with a broader context, from
facsimile images, through the editorial process, to a proposed final
presentation. This will be achieved through extensive use of graphic
and other media (e.g. screencasts or animations), not relying solely
on textual descriptions of phenomena discussed.
Finally, one of the common concerns with the TEI standard is its
increasing idiosyncrasy, for the most part a consequence of the
inability to express contextually diverse content models for the same
element. TEI Lite 2.0 task force intends to propose a syntax and
implementation for that problem, together with the reorganization of a
number of elements. We hope that the results of this effort will pave
the way for the new, P6, version of the TEI.
