Received: by UICVM (Mailer R2.07) id 8663; Mon, 03 Dec 90 20:39:02 CST Date: Sat, 1 Dec 90 15:51:00 GMT Reply-To: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List , Lou Burnard Sender: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List From: Lou Burnard Subject: Greenstein's workplan To: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" [As promised, there follows the text of papers currently being circulated to members of the WG for Historical Sources by Dan Greenstein. - LB] Proposed TEI Working Group on Historical Sources 9-9-90 At the International Conference of the Association for History and Computing, held September 1990 at the University of Montpellier, it was proposed that a small work group be formed to study in depth the TEI Guidelines and to produce comments and criticisms which could be used to extend their scope to cover the kinds of source documents typically used in a range of historical disciplines. The proposal was formally endorsed by the Council of the AHC, which requested Dr Greenstein to convene such a group to produce a detailed set of comments on the TEI Guidelines as soon as possible. Members of the group and their areas of special expertise are given below. The initiative will see from the list that an attempt has been made to ensure that as many broad areas of historical investigation and text types as possible are represented on the group. Members of the Group have agreed the following work plan. They will evaluate the guidelines with special attention to their utility for documents commonly used in their respective areas of expertise. They will attempt in particular to identify document, source or text types missing from the guidelines and/or bibliographical formats and analytical and interpretive procedures that the current guidelines do not seem to support. Members will prepare initial reports which are likely to adopt a structure parallel to that of the guidelines. These will be circulated internally in advance of a Group meeting. The Group formally requests that it be recognized as a Specialist Working Group of the TEI and that the Initiative fund its initial meeting. This is likely to take place at Oxford early in the new year (estimated costs of a two-day meeting provided below). The following have agreed to serve on the Working Group: Hans-Joergen Marker (Univ of Odense): Economic History Peter Denley (Univ of London): Medieval History Caroline Bourlet (IRHT, Paris): Medieval History Donald Spaeth (Univ of Glasgow): Early Modern History Jan Odervall (Univ of Tromso): Historical Demography Peter Wakelin (Wolverhampton Poly): Economic History Daniel Greenstein (Glasgow Univ): Political History Ingo Kropac (Univ of Graz): Text Manfred Thaller (MPIG): General Dear Colleague, 8 Nov 90 On 9 September, the enclosed document (or something very like it) was submitted to the TEI requesting that that body approve our group as a working party of the TEI paying special attention to historical sources. I am glad to say that the document was considered favourably by the TEI which has now sent to me draft guidlines for working groups (also enclosed - sorry about all the pointy brackets...). What is left now for us is to come up with a mutually agreed strategy and schedule for drafting our report on the TEI guidelines. It is with respect to this schedule or plan of work that I write you now. May I propose the following? As I think I agreed with you individually at Montpellier, it seems senseless to have a meeting until each of us has had a chance to consider the TEI Guidelines with respect to the historical documents in our respective areas of expertise and to come up with some recommendations. Therefore, I would propose that each of us draw up a report indicating the strengths and weaknesses of the TEI's guidelines with respect to those sources in our own particular areas by the end of January, 1991. If these reports could be submitted to me around that time, I would have a chance to go through them with Kevin Schurer of the Cambridge Group who has kindly agreed to help me integrate the individual reports into a draft proposal. The draft proposal and the individual reports could then be circulated to members of our group well in advance of a meeting tentatively scheduled to take place in Oxford around Easter time. At the very least I am sure that Kevin and I would manage to cobble together a draft agenda which might direct the work of the group when it meets (eg identifying documents still to be considered, indicating how we might integrate the documents into an overall report to be submitted to the TEI, plans to circulate members of the AHC for the widest possible input into our proceedings etc). Though I am certain that each of you is better placed than me to determine how to approach the TEI's guidelines with respect to sources in your own areas, it might help Kevin and me in drawing up a draft proposal if we roughly chose to adopt vaguely similar strategies. Let me emphasize that we needn't concern ourselves too much with developing the relevant SGML syntax (though please feel free to do so if you so desire). What we are being asked to do is to identify document types so far excluded from (or not yet comprensively covered by) the TEI's guidelines, the use to which these document types are normally put by historians, and the problems that arise in encoding and in interpreting such documents. If my reading of the guidelines is anything to go on, I suspect that we will find ourselves concentrating on chapters 4-7 in particular. Chapter 2 on the use of SGML is essential reading but may not attract much in the way of comment from most of us. Chapter 3 on characters and character sets will clearly effect some of us more than others and thus deserves our attention. Chapters 4-7 however seem to me to demand most of our attention. Bibliographic control, encoding declarations etc specified in chapter 4 seem highly dependent on the narrow range of document types (continuous prose texts) so far encompassed by the TEI. Chapter 5 on features common to many text types, is as dependent as chapter 4 on the range of document types so far considered. In chapter 6 on analytic and interpretive information, the historian's emphasis on categorical and numeric analyses is almost entirely excluded, and chapter 7 on features of specific text types must, it seems to me, be extended to include a whole range of historical sources. In addition reports which include a section with general comments in addition to those outlined above would also be welcomed and help to set the tone of our overall report. Please let me know if this schedule and strategy meet with your approval. If we are in agreement, I can formally submit them to the TEI and request funding for a meeting of our group in the spring. Yours ever, Daniel Greenstein ps - if you have not already received a copy of the TEI's guidlines please contact Lou Burnard at Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Rd, Oxford (Lou@Oxford.Vax) who will send you one straight away. rnard at Ox