Hi Lou--
I care about TEI conformance, and I had a few minutes this morning that I
didn't want to spend packing for an imminent trip, so I've read your squib
with interest. I've heard you talk about this sort of thing before, so it's
familiar, but I *do* have suggestions generally to improve it or use it as
a basis for Something More that perhaps might be shared widely with the TEI
community in written form.
1) CONTENT: Can you show us an example or two from real life to show the
benefit making TEI conformant decisions? I say this because at the TEI in
Vienna, one of the plenary speakers (Tara Andrews) seemed to think no one
wrote TEI with interoperability in mind. Yet we know there ARE examples of
major projects that are designed to share a common encoding, in order to
share a publishing system and build a shared information architecture. Two
examples I can think of are Georg Vogeler and the DTA, and Jeffrey Witt's
SCTA project to establish shared archive for medievalists: see
http://scta.info I think it's important for members of the TEI community
to see what we can do when we make a priority of coding for
interchange-ability.
2) STYLE: This squib has the familiar sound of Lou Burnard, which
stylometric analysis might locate in its distinctive use of idiomatic
expressions, such as "don't shoot the messenger" (I've never *quite*
understood that one, though I *think* I get it). There are vivid uses of
words like "cornucopia" to describe plentiful variety, and other
such..."hard wired", "tesselate", etc. I'm not sure whether "tesselate" in
the way you're using it to suggest element nesting actually means that in
real life--when I go to look it up, I see it used to describe breaking up
polygon shapes in tiling, and there's a tesselate element in KML. As your
friendly neighborhood English professor and erstwhile instructor of
technical writing, I suggest editing a bit to rely less on your audience's
knowledge of your native idiom. (And seriously, can we rethink "don't shoot
the messenger"?) I also realize this is probably about the most annoying
comment I could give because it targets the very vividness of your prose.
Anyway, to native speakers of English such idiom is more or less readily
accessible, but our community is international (as is your Heidelberg
presentation), and it seems to me we're all working on reducing ambiguities
and clarifying the prose of the Guidelines pretty intensively lately. What
you're delivering is really important, and really ought to be communicated
as widely as it can.
Hope this helps!
Elisa
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 6:33 AM, Lou Burnard
In the unlikely event that anyone still does, I have written a brief squib entitled "What is TEI conformance, and why should you care?"
Constructive comments ate welcome: readable text is at https://lb42.github.io/W/conformance.html
This is destined for presentation at a workshop in Heidelberg later this week, but it's not too late for you to make it better!
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--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
Director, Center for the Digital Text | Associate Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg | Humanities Division
150 Finoli Drive
Greensburg, PA 15601 USA
E-mail: ebb8@pitt.edu