A followup to the electronic dissertations using TEI issue:
 
A number of people have expressed interest in the creation of a suite of
tools (style sheets, guidelines and help, possibly a listserv, possibly
a special TEI-based thesis DTD) to make it easier to use the TEI
Guidelines to encode theses and dissertations. Since the initial
discussion seems to have died down a bit or gone private, perhaps now is
a good time to talk about what to do next and how to organize the
effort.
 
And I should say from the start that although (or because) I brought
this up, I am willing to coordinate these activities, willing to help
someone else do it, willing to do it as part of a team, and willing to
hand the whole idea over to some other more energetic and/or leisured
person.
 
My rough sense from the discussion so far is that the following things
(at least) need to happen:
 
[0. further discussion following this posting on what *really* needs to
happen]
 
1. some sort of organizational meeting, possibly at TEI10? or, if enough
interested parties will be at DRH, perhaps a start could be made there;
this meeting would produce a more solid and detailed list of the tools
we think are needed, and perhaps some rough plan to start creating them.
 
2. Investigate the suitability of TEI Lite for theses/dissertations;
solicit input from those who have tried to use it; look at other thesis
DTDs (such as the ETD DTD) to see what components they include and how
TEI accomplishes these things
 
3. MAKE THE TOOLS, to wit:
 
a. a DTD which can accommodate humanities theses, which may prove to be
a minor variant of TEI Lite; versions of this which satisfy the
idiosyncratic needs of the various applications that use this
platform/software-independent system
 
b. style sheets which implement basic thesis-style output for the major
SGML-aware applications (WordPerfect, Author/Editor, Word (?),
FrameMaker, etc.). It may be advantageous to provide several of these if
there are several different major sets of thesis specs to be
accommodated.
 
c. conversion tools between TEI/SGML and other useful formats for
various kinds of output (TeX, etc.)
 
d. instructions on the use of the various tools: how to download, how to
install, etc.; maybe also include something aimed especially at etext
centers interested in supporting
 
e. basic encoding assistance for the novice: what encoding is, why it's
useful, what TEI is and why it's useful; and, most importantly of all,
How to Use TEI to Encode Your Dissertation.
 
f. other things I am not thinking of
 
4. Establish a place for these things to live and a way for people to
get at them
 
5. Maybe set up a listserv for discussion of the ETD issue?
 
In the interests of keeping this discussion public, if no one minds,
could we keep it on TEI-L for the time being?
 
Please comment on the above and let us figure out what to do next.
 
Best, Julia
 
 
Julia Flanders, Textbase Editor
Brown University Women Writers Project
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