Readers of this list will recall a brief discussion in April of
a letter to the Times Literary Supplement from Geoff Sampson, a British
linguist (and member of the TEI work group on general linguistics).
In his letter, Dr. Sampson expressed fear that the TEI guidelines
would impede authors in their freedom of thought.
 
Recently (May 8), the TLS published a reply to Dr. Sampson from Susan
Hockey, the current chair of the TEI steering committee.  Since it may
be of interest to subscribers, I reproduce her letter below.  -CMSMcQ
 
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The Text Encoding Initiative
 
Sir, -- Geoffrey Sampson's perspective on the Text Encoding Initiative
(``Writing within bounds'', April 17) unfortunately misses some key
points. The TEI is just one application of SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language) which has been adopted by many publishers and
government agencies world-wide. SGML provides a way of defining one's
own document grammar to structure and encode an electronic text so that
the text can be used for different purposes, for example, database
searching and hypertext as well as for traditional typesetting and
print. SGML is extremely adaptable, and the limitations Sampson points
out are a feature of the particular implementation of SGML he is using,
not of SGML itself, nor of the TEI's application, which is designed to
be extended as the user wishes. Put simply, SGML allows you to do what
you like with an electronic text.
 
The TEI is striving to be as flexible as possible and to produce a tool
which permits scholars to manipulate electronic texts in many more ways
than have been possible up to now. It grew out of a desire for a common
encoding format to represent the structure of existing documents, not
for ``controlling future documents'' as Sampson states.  It has indeed
received substantial financial backing, and it wil achieve its objective
of providing a sound framework on which future scholarly work using
electronic texts can be based.
 
SUSAN HOCKEY
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
169 College Avenue, New Brunswick, New
Jersey 08903