Dear Elisa,

 

This is  promising news.  I take it somewhere at Penn State there is an institutional interest in the TEI and that you had something to do with it. Penn State is part of the Big Ten. In  the old days, when there were just  ten, the Big Ten Libraries formed a very productive alliance (called the CIC), which among other things was responsible for the Text Creation Partnership.  Technically that was a collaboration between Michigan and Oxford, but Michigan did the heavy lifting, and good deal of the money came from CIC subscribing libraries. Mark Sandler, a Michigan librarian who became the directory of the CIC Libraries initiative, negotiated the key provision of the  deal between Proquest and the TCP:  that the text would move into the public domain within five years of the completion of the project.

 

The TCP texts are arguably the most important and almost certainly  the largest collection of TEI-encoded texts.  At one time the CIC libraries  provided significant financial support for the TEI.  I haven’t seen a budget report from the TEI, but to gather from the dwindling number of institutional members and their average contributions, the budget must be pretty shaky.  I think there is a strong case to be made for the successor of the CIC—the  Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Initiatives—to take an active cross-institutional interest in the TEI.  What would be chump change to them would be significant support for the TEI.

 

I enclose with this email two longish documents.  One is a talk that I gave as the keynote address at the 2012 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, where I sketched a model of distributed editorial work that would actively engage undergraduates in the collaborative curation of our cultural heritage.  The other is a report to the Mellon Foundation about a number of steps towards building such a model.

 

I have sometimes toyed with the acronym CHOCK for Cultural Heritage Object Construction Kit.  The TEI provides a key tool—perhaps the key tool for such a kit. “Maker spaces” across many campuses, helped by network technologies, can be the sites for working gradually and in quite loosely coordinated ways towards a common goal.

 

You are an editor and should find this model attractive. If you can get enough librarians and faculty in the Big Ten Alliance to see how and why the TEI matters for undergraduate education, the long-term support for the TEI would be on pretty sound footing.

 

Best wishes

 

MM

 

 

 

 

 

From: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list <TEI-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU> on behalf of Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar@GMAIL.COM>
Date: Saturday, September 2, 2023 at 4:24 AM
To: TEI-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <TEI-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Mailing List Change of Address

Greetings, esteemed list members!

This TEI community listserv, like several others hosted at Brown University, is about to change its address to Penn State University. We hope you don't notice any significant difference when that happens!  You will automatically remain subscribed to the same lists. Mail from the list will be sent to you from a lists.psu.edu address instead of a listserv.brown.edu address. You will, for the foreseeable future, be able to send mail to the list using either the old listserv.brown.edu or the new lists.psu.edu address. However, you will want to update your bookmarks to the listserv archives to the new address as soon as the change has occurred, which will be announced here.

 

The big day for listserv transfer is scheduled on October 19, 2023, and it will be a team operation between Brown and Penn State IT.

Elli Mylonas will continue the day-to-day management of the listserv, with assistance from myself and Syd Bauman.

 

Please let us know if you have questions or concerns about the transfer operations. We'll be discussing this at the Annual General Meeting in Paderborn soon, so we can talk about it in person if you're there for the TEI-MEC conference.

 

Cheers,

Elisa, with Elli and Syd

--

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD

TEI Technical Council Chair and member of the TEI Infrastructure Group

Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities |  Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College 

Development site: https://newtfire.org