Newsgroups: alt.etext From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Subject: TEI Guidelines published Message-ID: <94136.124831U35395@uicvm.uic.edu> Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago, ADN Computer Center Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 12:48:31 CDT Lines: 104 Readers of this list/group will, I hope, be interested in the following announcement; please feel free to re-post it to other appropriate lists and groups. Thanks. -CMSMcQ ----- TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE PUBLISHES GUIDELINES On May 16, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) publishes its "Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange." This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial software packages. The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse of data among researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts is an expensive and time-consuming business. The object of the TEI was to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete. This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly evolving computer industry. To make them "future-proof", the TEI Guidelines use an international standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML was originally developed by the publishing industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software developers, publishers, and government agencies. It is one of the enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take shape. The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals. They must be both easily extensible and easily simplified. And their aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in all languages and writing systems, from any period in history. Consequently, the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama, and other performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks. The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed texts. The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added to the set of basic recommendations. These include methods for encoding hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts), representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates, representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing of texts for corpus-linguistic study. The Guidelines also define methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity. The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share their experience in using computers and to work out the specific recommendations in the Guidelines. The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics, which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and researchers worldwide. Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the world of humanities scholarship. The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the Internet. For more information contact the TEI editors by e-mail at tei@uic.edu or lou@vax.ox.ac.uk. Orders may be placed at the TEI offices in Chicago, Oxford or Chiba, addresses of which follow: In Europe: TEI Orders, Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK fax +44 865 273275 In East Asia: Prof. Syun Tutiya, Department of Philosophy Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho Inage-ku Chiba 263, Japan fax: +81 43 290 2287 Rest Of World: C. M. Sperberg McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago, Academic Computing Center (M/C 135), 1940 W. Taylor, Rm. 124, Chicago IL 60612-7352, USA fax: +1 312 668 6834