Via:      UK.AC.OX.VAX;  4 MAR 89 17:11:30 GMT
Date:     Sat, 4 Mar 89  17:12 GMT
From:     Lou Burnard <LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK>
To:       U35395@UICVM
Subject:  draft AB press-release

<doc,id=???lost my list of doc-codes!???,auth=LB>
<comment>
This is as much as I've been able to get done for you so far; it will clearly
need some revision and I'm not sure of the exact register to aim at; which is
why it starts and finishes as a press release, with a lot of background
guff inserted in between. You may find it amusing to read my perspective on
the deal anyway. If I hadnt lost my notebook there'd be more nitty gritty
about what actually went down at the meeting, but then I expect Board
Members will prefer to add their own views on that anyway. You will also note
that I have not named any names anywhere: this is a very British habit about
reticence and decorum (like not mentioning the cost of anything) which you may
revise as you see fit. And I'm sorry it hasnt been done faster - you wouldn't
believe the backlog of jobs I've had this last 2 weeks. And no crack in the
clouds till way past easter...
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<ti> Brief Project Description for Circulation to AB Members

That bumper-sticker dictum about the necessity of using a
computer "to really foul things up" took another knock at an
unusual gathering in Chicago last month. The first meeting of the
Text Encoding Initiative's Advisory Board brought together around
two dozen representatives from key professional and learned
societies representing academic disciplines across the spectrum
from hard core computer science to lexicography, literary studies
and anthropology as well as the professional interests of
librarians and publishers. The purpose of the event, hosted by
the University of Illinois at Chicago, was to seek the views of
the newly constituted Advisory Board concerning the structure and
proposed strategy of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), to
explain its relevance to the interests of the societies and to
encourage active participation in the work of the Initiative by
the societies' members.

<h1> History and Structure of TEI

It is now over a year since the Association for Computers and the
Humanities (ACH) organised a conference at Vassar College from
which emerged a set of resolutions (now known as the
"Poughkeepsie Principles") upon the necessity and feasibility of
defining a set of guidelines to facilitate both the interchange
of existing encoded texts and the creation of newly encoded
texts. The guidelines would specify both <em>what<\em> features
should be encoded and also <em>how<\em> they should be encoded,
as well as suggesting ways of describing the resulting encoding
scheme and its relationship with other pre-existing such schemes.

In the intervening period, ACH, together with the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL), has defined a three year work
plan to achieve these goals, which was presented at the Chicago
Meeting. Funding for the work plan has been provided by a
substantial grant from the American National Endowment for the
Humanities, which will cover the bulk of the costs of American
participation in the Initiative for the first phase of the
project, due to end June 1990. Equivalent funding for European
participation is currently being negotiated with the European
Commission, and it is also hoped to secure further support from
industry and government.

<h1> Committee Structure

The work plan will be co-ordinated by a six-member steering
committee and two Editors, one American and one British. It calls
initially for the setting up of four Working Committees, each
responsible for a distinct part of the work plan.

Committee 1, the Committee for Text Documentation, with a
membership drawn largely from the library and archive management
communities, will deal with issues concerning the cataloguing and
identification of key features of encoded texts. It will draw on
work already done in this field for social science data, for
example in the establishment of the Standard Study Description.
All the Committees will be expected to work within established
frameworks where these are available; the relevance here of work
already done in establishing Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules for
machine-readable sources is apparent.

Committee 2, for Text Representation, is concerned with the
encoding of such features as layout and character sets. It will
aim to provide precise recommendations covering all the features
of continuous discourse for which a convention already exists in
printed or written sources. This will involve a consideration of
the character sets of all alphabetic scripts currently used in
computer-based research. Explicit consideration of non-alphabetic
scripts, though not excluded, has been deferred; transcriptions
of spoken language will however be included. It will also
recommend ways of representing the structural divisions of a text
(book, chapter, paragraph etc.) and all other features
conventionally signalled in printed or written texts, such as
emphasis, quotation, critical apparatus etc.

Committee 3, the Committee for Text Analysis and Interpretation,
has the largest and most open-ended set of responsibilities of
the four. It will aim to provide discipline-specific sets of tags
appropriate to the analytic procedures favoured by that
discipline, but in such a way as to permit their extension and
generalisation to other disciplines using analogous procedures.
This being a very large brief, committee 3 will focus initially
on a single discipline (linguistics) and a single analytic
procedure (lexico-syntactic analysis), chosen primarily because
of its clear relevance to all other text-based types of analysis.
Its remit will shift focus as work proceeds, probably towards
literary and more introspective types of analysis. It is
anticipated that all four committees, with a maximum membership
of ten, will frequently need to set up sub-committees, and
Committee 3 already has one such, concerned with tagsets for
dictionary markup, which has already produced a set of guidelines
based on work done at the University of Waterloo in the tagging
of the <it>New Oxford English Dictionary<\it>; it is hoped to
form a second, concerned with the tagging of historical sources,
to take advantage of the substantial progress already made in
this area by the informal network of European scholars
collaborating on the <it>Leio<\it> project at the Max Planck
Inst. fuer Geschichte in Goettingen FRG, at Graz University in
Austria and elsewhere.

Committee 4 was charged at the Poughkeepsie meeting with the
definition of a "metalanguage" - a language capable of specifying
and describing mark up languages. The emergence of an ISO
standard (6689, Standard Generalised Markup Language) and its
increasing acceptance within both government and publishing
communities, has removed that burden, but replaced it by that of
assessing the extent of compatibility possible between the tag
sets proposed by the other three committees and the SGML
standard. The Guidelines will work within the syntactic framework
of SGML, departing from it if (and only if) it proves inadequate
to the needs of research. So far no areas of divergence have been
identified, though there has been considerable discussion within
the Committee (which began work last month) on the extent to
which all features of SGML can be recommended. The committee's
main task will be to validate and test the Guidelines as they
emerge, to arbitrate on matters of SGML-conformance and also to
propose ways of mapping existing encoding standards to the
Guidelines.

<h1> The Chicago Meeting
In addition to the three sponsoring organisations, the following
associations are currently represented on the Advisory Board:
<it> American Anthropological Association;  American Historical
Association; American Philological Association; American Society
for Information Science; Association for Computing Machinery;
Association for Documentary Editing; Association for History and
Computing; Association Internationale Bible et Informatique;
Canadian Linguistic Association; Dictionary Society of North
America; Electronic Publishing SIG; International Federation of
Library Associations and Institutions; Linguistic Society of
America;Modern Language Association.<\it>

After an initial presentation about the history, background,
objectives and structure of the TEI, delegates were invited to
comment on their own interest and the constituencies they served.
A series of presentations concerning the implications of the TEI
for Humanities Research, for Computational Linguistics and for
the Language Industries followed lunch. The goals and
responsibilities of each of the working committees were then
described, as outlined above. The second full day of the meeting
began with a very brief tutorial on SGML and a longer description
of the design principles, scope and end products of the
Guidelines.  After a wide ranging and useful discussion, in which
some constructively critical reactions were expressed, members of
the Advisory Board expressed  approval of the objectives,
organisational structure and design goals of the Initiative, as
they had been presented at the meeting. It also noted the draft
work plans submitted by the Heads of Committees to the meeting,
with the understanding that these would be revised in accordance
with experience and the suggestions made by the Board.

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