Re: [tei-council] what's in a name?

You keep saying it isn't simple/easy. But really from an end-user's point of view it is....isn't it? There are a lot less elements to worry about, mostly there is one way of doing things, and Lou has improved the documentation, so it is the TEI but a fairly simple version of the TEI. Users aren't really going to be doing much more than encoding with it and sticking it into some pre-defined system for output. And sure, I agree with you wholeheartedly about recommendations of customisations, and when they have no one to ask then yes, they might take the one they think is easiest. (That is tei_all in my experience of users...) But I think all the other names have the same problems where they imply similar things even if for a particular subcommunity. I'm not sure that them choosing simple (and finding it doesn't do everything they way) is actually a bad thing. It was what MartinM wanted with his TEI Nudge... an easy route into the TEI which did a lot of the things you wanted, but if you wanted to do something more complex then you needed to find out how to add in more things, etc. Part of the point was also to have it tied to high-quality outputs for book-like objects. And that (and the documentation) is where I think we need to improve. The eXist-db TEI Publisher is a good thing, but only one possible output. I'm much less worried about the name than you though. -James On 21/10/16 15:43, Hugh Cayless wrote:

"Simple" is bad as a name on many levels:

1. It's not simple. 2. It doesn't describe what the customization is for. 3. People tend to conflate "simple" with "easy" and will naturally tend towards choosing the easy. We shouldn't be pushing people in a particular direction without knowing what they're trying to do.* 4. It opens us up to snarky jokes. They pretty much write themselves.

I'm much less worried about TEI Print, which might confuse people for 30 seconds, but they can read and see it's for printed materials, and not make any bad decisions.

Other variants are fine too: TEI Printed, TEI Bookish, TEI Old Print, whatever. Let's just please not do Simple.

* I think of recommending a customization as being a bit like what happens when you ask a Reference Librarian to recommend a book on X. They will respond by asking you "What do you want it for?"

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Scholger, Martina ( martina.scholger@uni-graz.at) wrote:

...

Hi,

@TEI Print: I agree with Elli that "TEI Print" may be confusing and lets one think of print output (maybe I have the connotation because there is a joint project from German universities called "XML print"). I think it is somehow misleading. If we go for "print", I would prefer an additional term like "earlyPrint", as Lou suggested, or something else.

@TEI Simple: I like James' idea of building other schemas on the basis of TEI Simple (or whatever it is called in the end) in the future. I would have no problem with keeping it as TEI Simple. While it contains a couple of complexities (the header, as discussed earlier this week), it is a reduced and well documented set and I'm not sure how an even more simplified version would look like...

@TEI Bookish That sounds not too bad, actually. And I like Raff's explanation.

Martina

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: tei-council-bounces@lists.tei-c.org [mailto:tei-council-bounces@ lists.tei-c.org] Im Auftrag von Raffaele Viglianti Gesendet: Donnerstag, 20. Oktober 2016 19:31 An: James Cummings; tei-council@lists.tei-c.org Betreff: Re: [tei-council] what's in a name?

I think Lou was semiserious when he offered TEIBookish, but I kind of like it. It indicates that it's mainly for books, but can deal with other stuff, including the other publication types that Martin brought up (broadsides, pamphlets...)

I have no big issue with TEI Print. On the other hand TEI Simple may be misleading when a newbie uses it thinking it would be simple, but instead it turns out it's not that simple and is only good to encode printed material by (mostly) dead with men.

Raff

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 1:20 PM, James Cummings < James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

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TEI PBWWM. (Printed books by white western men. ;-) ) (And yes, I know the objections to that, but exceptions aside it still does capture the limitations of scope for the TE Simple project.)

Ok, I still like TEI Simple. I think people could then build on this to do say critical editions with TEI Simple Editions, manuscript descriptions with TEI Simple msDesc, and corpora with TEI Simple Corpora, etc. etc. i.e. I view it as a starting point which some people will just use but from which we can make the more specific customisations targeting specific communities.

If you decide it is just about print or books then TEI Books and TEI Print aren't *bad*. Just don't float my boat as much.

-James

On 20/10/16 18:13, Lou Burnard wrote:

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I'd really like us to come to a conclusion on what the-schema-formerly-known-as-simple should be called, this week if possible.

So far I've noticed some mild approval (and one objection) to renaming it as TEI Print. There's also been some mild approval for the notion that its current name is not good. But no other alternative seems to command support. My experience has always been that deciding on a name for anything can take weeks and weeks and never reach any satisfactory conclusion because it's always possible to say "nah I dont like it". So can we have a sharp deadline for this discussion? I suggest Monday 24th, midnight CET. And a rule that says "if you don't like [name] you have to propose a better one" might help too.

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

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