Received: by UICVM (Mailer R2.02) id 6568; Fri, 06 Jan 89 09:51:28 CST Date: Fri, 6 Jan 89 10:46 EST Reply-To: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List , IDE@VASSAR Sender: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List From: IDE@VASSAR To: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" To the steering committee: The primary purpose of our meeting is to work out with the committee heads the organization of the committees and subcommittees, and to lay out in explicit terms the work of each committee and the way in which it will be accomplished. I sent around a questionnaire to each committee head which all of you have seen, (it is given below for your convenience) which includes in very broad terms the questions we must answer at this meeting. However, we must go into these questions in considerably more detail, in order to enable the committeee heads to write for their committees a work charge that will serve as an explicit guide for committee and subcommittee members. This charge should be ready by March 1. Only Sandra Mamrak replied to the questionnaire, and her reply was very brief. Stig hadn't enough time to prepare a written statement and Terry seems to have had very little time either. I assume both will come with at least verbal answers to the questions. In any event one thing we might want to get across, implicitly if not explicitly, is that the work of the committee heads and, soon, the committees must now begin in earnest. QUESTIONS: (1) What do you see as the focus of the work of the main committee? Please provide a list of items if it seems appropriate. (2) What do you see as the necessary specialties or strengths of committee members? More generally, what is the ideal make-up, in terms of expertise, of the committee? (3) Are there obvious requirements for the organization of the main committee or the division of labor etc.? (4) What sub-committees do you believe will be required for the work of the committee? (This applies primarily to committees 1, 2, and 3.) Please provide a list that is as exhaustive as possible, breaking down the field of your committee in a logical way into the sub-areas (and possibly, sub-sub-areas) which will require intensive work by small groups. This subcommittee organization represents, in effect, a rough conceptual breakdown of your committee's problem area; we are especially concerned to get this conceptual organization right at this point in the project. (5) Do you see any special requirements for your committee as to: - coordination of subcommittees, - overlapping membership between your committee and its subcommittees (membership in subcommittees is assumed to be independent of membership in the parent committees), - coordination of your subcommittees, or - coordination of your committee's work with that of the other working committees? (A Listserv list on Bitnet will be set up for TEI participants; do other mechanisms recommend themselves?) It would be useful for you to list the areas in which you now foresee special needs to coordinate your work with the other committees. Many of these seem obvious, but may not be equally obvious to everyone. (6) Do you have any recommendations, suggestions, or desiderata concerning who the members of the committee and sub-committees should be? Please provide a list of the names of people whom you think would be appropriate for the committee, sub-committees, or other committees. We will have nominations from the various participating and sponsoring organizations which should be honored as far as possible, but there may be fewer nominations than places. ____________ To answer these questions we will have to consider in detail what the work of the sub-committees will be, what coordination is required (e.g., in what areas is there potential overlap or impact between the work of one sub-committee and another?), the relationship between the sub-committees and committees (for instance, are committee members each responsible for or head of a sub-committee or sub-committees? or is there no overlap between the two?), and the relationship among the four main committees (what areas may require that there be communication among the committees and how this will be accomplished). This last question is one which the steering committe must address. In general, we must first outline what the committees and sub-committees will be doing, and then (probably from the bottom up) work out the way in which this work will be organized and coordinated. A schedule of activities and meetings should also be worked out, at least in general terms which the committee heads can then fill in in more detail. ***** We also need to discuss at least two other items: funding and the archives board. Funding is obvious: Don is working on industrial funding and I am working on foundation funding. Antonio doubtless has some news to give us about the status of European funding. The archives board may require some more discussion. We agreed, as you recall, that we should have a board of archives which would meet several times during the project to discuss our work to date and provide input and expertise. Each archive would provide us weith information about encoding schemes that they have developed or use. At the end, we will ask them to endorse the guidelines, in a vote taken separately from that of the Advisory Board and which will require their convening for the vote. The questions we need to address are: 1) who should be asked to serve on this board? I have assembled a preliminary list of archives and other projects, which is appended. To decide who should be on this board, we must first define what an archive is. The function of our board is to provide expertise and to endorse (and use as an interchange standard) our guidelines. There are archives which hold a lot of words of text (say, 5-10 million words) and there are projects which hold small amounts of text but which have developed interesting encoding methods. The latter group would not help us much as far as endorsement is concerned, but can provide expertise. The former group in most cases will provide expertise and be valuable to us as an endorser. What should the criterion be? Is the main intent to involve the major holders of volumes of text? Can we involve the projects in some other way, as members of committees etc.? 2) related question: how will the involvement of the archives be supported? If the TEI is to fund their involvement, we must, first, have more funds and, second, limit the number of archives who are invited to participate. On the other hand we could ask the archives to support their own involvement, which could have other drawbacks such as eliminating some of our most valuable allies from the board. Yet it hardly seems likely that we can fund the archives, it is advantageous to be able to invite everyone we want to, and it is in the archives' interests to be a part of the project. We need to set up this board *soon* if their particiaption is to be of use to us (and so that they feel involved from the start) and so it is imperative that we come up with some definitive idea of waht we want to do so that invitations to participate can be sent out in the near future. PRELIMINARY LIST OF ARCHIVES AND PROJECTS: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Irvine CA Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale C.N.R., Pisa Institut de la langue francaise, Nancy CETEDOC, Louvain-la-Neuve Oxford Text Archive, Oxford Norwegian Center for Computing in the Humanities, Bergen Institut fur deutschen Sprache, Mannheim Global Jewish Database, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan International Computer Archive of Modern English, Oslo Leiden Sprakdata, Department of Computational Linguistics, Gothenburg LASLA, Liege Saarbrucken Lund, Survey of Spoken English (now part of ICAME?) Child? Academy of Science, Budapest ATR, Japan Armamagnaean Institute Survey of Language Usage LARSP, Reading Hindel Brown Corpus, Rhode Island (now part of ICAME) COBUILD, Birmingham TOSCA: The Nijmegen Research Group for Corpus Linguistics, English Department, University of Nijmegen, Erasmusplein 1, 6526 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Other possibilities? Stofnun Arna Magnussonar, Reykjavik Center for the Computer Analysis of Text, Univ. of Pennsylvania Dartmouth Dante Project Center for Humanities Research, BYU, Provo (Randy Jones) Cambridge, England Institut fuer Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik, Bonn Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem Finland -- foreign language archive? PHI - Packard Humanities Institute Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language (at Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, U of Wisconsin) Dictionary of Old English (Toronto) Older Scots texts (Aitken)