TEI Lite 2.0 Task force
Dear Elisa and Council, Following up on our discussions in the F2F meeting in Buenos Aires I would like to request establishing a task force to create a new, substantially changed revision of the TEI Lite. As agreed in BA, task force members will be as follows: Helena Bermúdez-Sabel Gustavo Fernandez Riva Martina Scholger Magdalena Turska As for the organization of work, we are planning to meet in person in January 2025, in my house in Poland. Best regards, Magdalena Scope of the work and planned deliverables TEI Lite 2.0 task force is dedicated to the creation of the new TEI Lite schema and corresponding Guidelines with extended examples section. These will be accompanied by implementations for the new functionalities required for the schema processing and Guidelines publication. Rationale Motivations for the new version of the TEI Lite are several. First, its original dates back to 1996, later followed by a series of updates varying in scope. The last substantial revision was made in 2006, at a time when both the technologies supporting XML processing were not as developed, and, more importantly, consensus regarding publication and interoperability of TEI-encoded texts was completely lacking and implementation praxis varied hugely. Therefore TEI Lite (and TEI) Guidelines for the most part pay no heed to processing and publishing concerns, in particular rarely addressing encoding strategies for composite, heterogeneous collections, focusing rather on the "archive" function of the format, where effectively all information is injected into a single TEI resource. The task force's intention is to expand the horizon of the TEI Lite Guidelines, to discuss recommended data modeling, organization and processing practices for a broad range of real life uses. Especially the processing part will make use of the TEI Processing Model, non-existent yet when TEI Lite was last updated. Second, despite decades of efforts from the TEI community, the standard is still too often perceived as prohibitively complex, and even the presence of TEI Lite with its reduced set of elements did not amend the situation. One reason may be the fragmentary character of existing resources to learn TEI from, both in terms of structure and examples provided. Particularly the latter in the Guidelines are usually missing the broader context, from the facsimile of the original source to the complete TEI document to which they might belong, therefore making it impossible for the users to analyze the complete picture the Guidelines try to portray. Therefore, TEI Lite aims to extend the base of full encoding examples as well as illustrate remaining fragmentary ones with a broader context, from facsimile images, through the editorial process, to a proposed final presentation. This will be achieved through extensive use of graphic and other media (e.g. screencasts or animations), not relying solely on textual descriptions of phenomena discussed. Finally, one of the common concerns with the TEI standard is its increasing idiosyncrasy, for the most part a consequence of the inability to express contextually diverse content models for the same element. TEI Lite 2.0 task force intends to propose a syntax and implementation for that problem, together with the reorganization of a number of elements. We hope that the results of this effort will pave the way for the new, P6, version of the TEI.
participants (1)
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Magdalena Turska