Re: [tei-council] conformanzzzzzzzz

I think Elisa is spot-on. "Tesselate" is entirely correct (tiles don't overlap), but it's also highly technical. "Don't shoot the messenger" does have an odd aspect to it, particularly as applied to EpiDoc. I'm guessing it's meant to be a little funny, and to be a bit of a strawman for your argument that one should learn to customize one's TEI as needed. I agree with the thrust of that argument, but the joke falls flat for me. EpiDoc is meant to be a very specific tool, created for a small community of practice that has followed a pretty consistent set of editorial conventions for decades. It may not work for you outside those parameters, though people are sometimes tempted by it, I think because of its attention to the materiality of texts, which other types of edition certainly care about. EpiDoc is a Torx driver, if you will. So it's great if you have Torx screws, but not so much if they're Phillips screws, and worse if you have nails. "We don't do windows" perhaps? Or "fit for purpose"? On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Elisa Beshero-Bondar wrote:

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

...

wrote:

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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 Development site: http://newtfire.org -- tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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