This was first posted on Humanist shortly after the TEI workshop in
Oxford; it ought to be of interest to this list as well. -CMSMcQ
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 91 15:49:18 BST
From: Donald A Spaeth <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Report on first European TEI workshop
LIVING WITH THE GUIDELINES
The first TEI European Workshop
Oxford University Computing Service
1-2 July 1991
The first European workshop of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was
held in Oxford on 1-2 July 1991. The TEI is an international effort to
develop and disseminate guidelines for encoding and exchanging
machine-readable texts. The first phase of the TEI was completed by the
publication of the Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of
Machine- Readable Texts (1990), and several Working Committees, Working
Groups and Affiliated Projects are now expanding and refining these
guidelines.
The two-day workshop was attended by fifty people from fourteen
countries, of whom the largest number were from Britain. Not
surprisingly, linguistics and language studies were the best-represented
subject areas, but by no means the only ones. The workshop was taught
by the TEI Co-Editors, Lou Burnard and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, and by
Elaine Brennan (Brown), Harry Gaylord (Groningen) and Terry Langendoen
(Arizona). The speakers had obviously worked very hard, and the two
days went without hitch.
The workshop included a neatly-balanced mixture of group discussions,
lectures on technical issues and software demonstrations and practicals.
It opened with a warm-up session, Why Tag Texts. The group looked at
the workshop's core text, portions from Mary Robinson's 'Thoughts on the
Condition of Women' (1799), both in its original printed format and as
keyed in by the Brown Women's Writers Project and marked up by Michael
Sperberg-McQueen. The task was to identify textual elements which
should be marked up, and this raised a number of issues. There was some
disagreement between those who believed every descriptive variation
should be encoded, including the breadth of vertical lines and whether
left or right quotes were used, and those who did not. Joy Jenkyns
(Oxford) pointed out that typography could hold clues to interpretation,
for example, the similarity between a long 's' and an 'f' might point to
a sight-rhyme between 'wise' and 'wife'. Jeremy Clear (OUP), tongue
firmly in cheek, deployed the 'reductio ad absurdum' argument that we
should mark-up an upper-case 'I' as 'a vertical line with two serifs'.
(In the closing session on Tuesday, John Dawson (Cambridge) suggested
that only elements which were to be processed by computer needed
tagging, and there was general agreement that it would be desirable to
accompany documents with digital images of the original).
We returned to group discussion of tagging after lunch, in a session
entitled Textual Anarchy: The Challenge for the TEI. Lou Burnard had
chosen examples of texts from those held in the Oxford Text Archive and
had attempted to replace the tagging scheme used in the original with
TEI tags; the examples came from the Paston Letters, a blues lyric and
Beowulf. Our task was to match the features tagged in the two versions;
extra points were awarded for observing elements which had been marked
up incorrectly or which the TEI could not mark up The session did an
excellent job of pointing out why the TEI is necessary, since each
example used its own idiosyncratic scheme, although everyone was too
embarrassed too admit to having scored the most points!
The TEI technical presentations included reviews of basic SGML and TEI
concepts and an exposition of advanced TEI features. The reviews were
overly brief and schematic, containing nothing that was new for readers
of Draft 1 of the TEI Guidelines (TEI P1) while offering insufficient
guidance for novices; the mixed experience of the audience made it
difficult to judge the right level for these sessions. Terry
Langendoen's paper on advanced features explored techniques for encoding
linguistic feature structures and for abbreviating verbose coding by
defining thousands of entities. I found particularly useful the analogy
he drew between feature structures and relational database tables, since
as an historian I need techniques for marking up record structures in
text, and the techniques he was describing (and still developing)
clearly had applications outside the field of linguistics.
The practical sessions answered the common complaint that there is
little software for preparing and analysing TEI- conformant texts. Lou
Burnard briefly outlined the software choices and the issues to be
considered in choosing software, distinguishing between Parsers,
Editors, Filters, Formatters and Retrieval Systems. Two sessions, Uses
for Tagged Texts and a TEI Users' Forum, demonstrated examples of
several of these types of software. Filters or transducers provide a
means of converting other systems of tags into SGML or vice versa.
Examples included a Nota Bene program which converted SGML tags into NB
formatting; KEDIT macros converting SGML tags into COCOA tags for
analysis with micro-OCP; and the B- Transducer. Filters are useful for
converting already-tagged text into TEI-conformant text but for new
texts SGML editors have the advantage of validating texts automatically
as they are tagged. Two hands-on practicals gave us the opportunity to
try out two editor/parsers, Mark-It (DOS) and Author Editor (Macintosh),
and we saw how the latter enabled SGML tags to be used as stylesheets to
produced formatted.output. On the retrieval side, we saw a simple
SPITBOL program produce a list of all proper names in the core Robinson
text as well as a prototype of the Oxford Textual Analysis System under
development by OUP. Also on show were: Collate, a program for
collating variant versions of manuscripts, which now takes TEI-tagged
text as input or output; and RUTH, an editor which allows the user to
tag texts using a KWIC concordance. The Users' Forum included reports
on the forthcoming Chadwyck- Healy CD-ROM database of English poetry, to
be distributed with TEI-markup; and the Wittgenstein Archives, who are
developing their own distinctly non-TEI markup and analysis software.
The workshop closed with a talk by Michael Sperberg-McQueen on
TEI-conformance and a general discussion on the TEI and the workshop
itself. Michael Sperberg-McQueen drew a distinction between the
different formats in which textual data might be held: at data capture,
for a specific application, as stored on a local computer, and for
interchange. Ideally, text should be held in a single format which can
be understood by many applications rather than in a different format for
each application. In a change from the Guidelines, he announced THAT
TEI WOULD IN FUTURE DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TEI-CONFORMANCE -- RESTRICTED TO
SGML BUT ALLOWING ALL LOCAL CHARACTERS -- AND TEI-interchange format --
using the subset of ASCII defined in the Guidelines. He outlined
several desiderata for software, including minimal tag redundancy,
allowing attributes to be used to differentiate variants of a tag, and
selective display, so that the user can turn off selected tags or
elements for viewing.
In the final session, participants expressed concern about the cost and
complexity of marking up text with SGML. It was claimed that the costs
of data definition, data entry (including training), and storage,
particularly given the verbosity of SGML, put it beyond the reach of
many publishers and projects, and perhaps all but large
government-funded projects. In expressing concern about complexity, it
was clear that a number of participants were daunted by the prospect of
wading through the Guidelines and SGML manuals. Several participants
argued that compendia were needed which identified tags relevant to each
subject area, although Michael Sperberg-McQueen said that it was too
early to prepare these since the TEI was still under development.
These anxieties about TEI markup suggest that future workshops must
devote more time to the practical issues of developing Data Type
Definitions (DTDs) and marking up texts from participants' own research.
One person observed that we had not examined Data Type Definitions
(DTDs), although we had been told that that they were a crucial part of
a TEI- conformant text, not least because they document the tags used.
In fact, the booklet 'An Introduction to TEI Tagging' which was given to
all those attending provides a suitably gentle introduction, as well as
a sample DTD used to mark up the Robinson core text. Even this DTD,
described as 'a simplified TEI document type description', is eight
pages long and includes 85 element tags. Perhaps future workshops
should use this more explicitly as a workbook in a practical session
replacing one or more of the software sessions. Training of this sort
is crucial if TEI recommendations are to be follow widely.
Running a workshop for an audience mixed both in discipline and
experience is difficult. The use of Robinson as a core text was an
effective device, but there was always the risk (particularly in the
opening session) that people would think that this laid down what <emph>
must </emph> be marked up for TEI-conformance. On the contrary, each
scholar will only mark up the elements which he or she wishes to study.
This is why IT IS IMPORTANT FOR WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS TO BE ABLE TO TAG
THEIR OWN TEXTS UNDER SUPERVISION.
This raises the broader question of how prescriptive the TEI should be.
While some participants expressed concern that the TEI was too
prescriptive, others pointed out that users could develop their own
idiosyncratic attributes, once again creating an obstacle to free
interchange of data. Should the TEI (with help from subject-specific
working parties) develop increasingly detailed descriptions of document
types and tags (including even subject-specific DTDs) which all scholars
will use? Or should scholars be left free to develop their own tags and
DTDs based upon their research needs, with SGML- conformance providing a
mechanism for documentation and therefore easing exchange? The latter
approach is of particular relevance for subjects relatively new to
text-based analysis, such as history, but TEI compendia and training
will be needed.
I found the TEI Workshop both enjoyable and stimulating. It is hard to
see how much more could have been packed into two rich days, which
included a reception given by the CTI Centre for Textual Studies and an
evening punting on the River Cherwell! I was pleased to see that the
SGML and TEI communities are so healthy, and hope that this will be only
the first of many TEI workshops in Europe.
Donald Spaeth
University of Glasgow
TEI History Working Group
13 July 1991
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