Re: [tei-council] TEI conformance issues

I protest—I am very interested in anything semantic to do with how we teach “good”/“expected”/“sustainable”/“compliant”/“conformant” applications of the TEI! I am also up to my neck in university semester Everything, and want time to think about it, after a good night’s sleep. A few weeks ago, overwhelmed with my burgeoning e-mail inbox, I ventured a post here to say the issues being discussed here seem momentous enough to call for some kind of Symposium or dedicated Think Tank. These in particular (what *are* the three terms, or do we not know them yet and are they just “areas”?) related to the ranges of meaning of “conformance” seem especially important for serious thinking and debate. I think we should get the debate started here and try to define its terms, but I would aslo Urge that we open this up to a broader venue for discussion—find a good venue to invite more members of the community to participate. That said, here is my take on the words “conformance” and “compliance”: They connote pressure to conform, of course, and perhaps they support the unpopular notion of “The TEI as thought police” imposing particular conceptions of hierarchy. Most of us here, of course, don’t subscribe to that view, and conformance has positive connotation associated with *compatibility* and (perhaps even?) interoperability (though I heard a plenary speaker in Vienna say she hadn’t seen much evidence of interoperable TEI projects because as she sees it, we encourage too much adaptation). I don’t agree because, well, I’ve seen the work that Georg Vogeler has been doing with associating TEI with RDF, and I’ve also seen lots of evidence from within the TEI eXist-db community of interest in compatibiilty with standard TEI elements…hey, there’s another term: “standard.” I feel as if we may need to do some cultural(!) work to reclaim these terms, especially as I am, in the course of teaching a literary theory course, encountering negative characterizations of the text and information modeling we do right and left from those who critique XML markup on the grounds of authoritarian hierarchy. See Johanna Drucker’s chapter, “Graphesis and Code” from her book on the SpecLab project, or a quick summary here: http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226165097.003.0008 http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226165097.003.0008 . I’ve heard quite a lot of such theoretically hyped critiques of markup and would like to find a way to answer them (although I believe the best answer is the steady and quiet one: build projects that matter and learn from and with the TEI as an interactive consortium that thinks together and sets standards of practice. Alas, I may not be coherent right now as I’m operating on about 4 hours of sleep. But I did want to chime in because Lou seemed to think Council members aren’t participating enough…I am sorry for my lack of participation, but this is what I am thinking right now on the subject. Elisa -- 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 mailto:ebb8@pitt.edu Development site: http://newtfire.org http://newtfire.org/

On Mar 20, 2017, at 4:58 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:

Apologies for being obscure. I had in mind the two categories of which Martin speaks, and a third category of "everything which doesn't come under the other two categories".

As to your other question, at the start of this thread I did say "It seemed to me it might be helpful to establish whether the Council agrees about what the notion of conformance *ought to mean* before trying to make sure that the text of the Guidelines express it."

In the background however, I have been reading the text of chapter 23 and identifying where it needs (in my view) to be brought up to date or made less vague. I was hoping to get a consensus on the rather fundamental issue of whether "conformance" is something we all understand in the same way before banging on about those issues though. But so far I am a bit disappointed in Council's apparent lack of interest in either topic. Given that at least three current members of Council regularly teach courses on how to use ODD and how to modify the Guidelines, this seems , um, a bit odd.

On 20/03/17 19:56, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

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You are always so good at making me feel slow-witted.

What are the three categories of which you speak? The two that Martin identifies and … ? I appreciate that the labeling is a bit tricky, but if you can’t identify them, I don’t know whether I agree or not.

(Actually, that’s not true. If you *don’t* identify them, I don’t know whether I agree or not. If you *can’t* identify them, I definitely don’t agree.)

Michael

p.s. And a question of my own: several of the issues I raised last month on GitHub amount to asking what various terms in chapters 22 and/or 23 of P5 mean, and what various passages which use those terms mean.

In this email thread so far, the discussion seems to be focusing not on how to interpret the text of P5, but on how the TEI and/or the Guidelines should define concepts like conformance. Should one infer from that that those who have contributed to the discussion so far don’t think the current text of P5 is worth expounding and have moved on from “How shall we interpret these passages in P5?” to “What shall we put in their place?”

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On Mar 20, 2017, at 10:58 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:

So, are we all agreed that there are not two but three usefully distinct categories related to the vague concept of "using TEI correctly", whatever they may be called?

On 17/03/17 18:59, Hugh Cayless wrote:

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I've been chewed out for it recently, but I agree with Martin 🙂.

Sent from my phone.

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On Mar 17, 2017, at 14:36, Martin Holmes wrote:

Hi Lou,

Yes, my position is that conformance is a useful concept only if it can be assessed programmatically (presumably through validation); but there is another aspect of "using TEI correctly" which needs another name.

We could have "syntactic conformance" (validity) versus "semantic conformance".

We could have "conformance" versus "compliance".

We could have "TEI-valid" versus "TEI-conformant".

Cheers, Martin

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On 2017-03-17 10:59 AM, Lou Burnard wrote: Hi Martin and thanks for your feedback.

You're right about the customized subset blob being in the wrong place. The problem is that a customized subset may or may not overlap a TEI subset. Maybe it should float above it. Or something.

Thanks also for reminding me to say something about the @source: that's a real omission.

Would it be fair to summarize your position as saying that TEI conformance can only be assessed automatically? And that any modification which results in something other than a pure TEI subset is ipso facto non conformant? It's a reasonable (ish) position : I just wanted to be sure.

Anyone else want to put their head above the parapet?

> On 17/03/17 15:40, Martin Holmes wrote: > I'm still puzzled by this diagram. Your description of a "customized > subset" suggests that it may validate documents which are not valid > against tei_all, whereas the blob for it falls squarely within the TEI > subset box. > > As far as I'm concerned, I would make it even simpler: any > customization that validates files which are not valid against tei_all > is an extended subset. It extends the TEI by providing options > (perhaps new elements or attributes, perhaps just new content models > for existing elements) which were not available before. > > I think the definition of TEI conformance should be that all files > valid against a schema generated from the customization also validate > against a tei_all schema generated from the same P5 subset used to > create the first schema (so the TEI versions used must be the same). > Anything else is an extension. > > This is a purely mechanical test, of course. It doesn't check whether > you're using <title> to tag measurements or <name> to tag bold text. I > think adherence to the spirit of the prose definitions and > descriptions needs a different word to describe it (and a human to > judge it). > > Cheeers, > Martin > >> On 2017-03-17 06:24 AM, Lou Burnard wrote: >> I've been thinking about what the Guidelines say about conformance in >> chapter 23, following Michael's spate of tickets and the subsequent >> debate last month. It seemed to me it might be helpful to establish >> whether the Council agrees about what the notion of conformance *ought >> to mean* before trying to make sure that the text of the Guidelines >> express it. So I have prepared a little (really little!) document for >> you to read and disagree or (hopefully) not with. All comments welcomed. >> >> The document is at http://lb42.github.io/W/conformance.html (there was >> an earlier version on my foxglove blog, but now that I've got my >> ceteicean foo back I'll be maintaining this document on github instead) >> >> >> -- tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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******************************************** C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Black Mesa Technologies LLC cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com http://www.blackmesatech.com ********************************************

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