Advanced Topics in TEI

In the decade since the 1994 publication of the TEI
Guidelines, this important text encoding standard has seen
widespread use in a variety of research and digitization
environments. In some contexts, its application has become
routine: digital libraries now publish huge volumes of lightly
encoded TEI documents through mechanisms which are well
understood and thoroughly documented. However, in other
quarters intensive research on the TEI continues unabated. Not
only are the Guidelines themselves now being revised (with
the publication of P5 planned for 2005), but applications of the
TEI to specific research areas continue to emerge, and new
tools are continually being developed to support a variety of
analytic and publication functions.
This panel session brings together several short presentations
on advanced topics in the TEI research landscape, which reflect
the breadth and depth of work currently being done in this
community. The presentations include advanced markup issues,
the design of the language in which the TEI itself is written and
documented, and current TEI tools development. The panel
chair will open the panel by giving a very brief contextual
description of the current development context for the TEI: the
goals of P5, the user community, and current trends in analytical
use of TEI markup. Following the four short papers by panelists
(described below), the chair and panelists will lead a discussion
of advanced use of the TEI and future research directions. The
goal of the panel is twofold: first, to provide an update to the
humanities computing community on some important research
efforts within the TEI; and second, to provide an opportunity
for a discussion of the impact and value of this research and its
direction for the future. The first paper will discuss the perennial problem of
overlapping markup, and will describe a TEI implementation
of the CLIX solution, which has emerged from the work of the
TEI Special Interest Group (SIG) on Overlap. The CLIX
approach involves using two empty elements to indicate where
each element in a subordinate hierarchy (or at least, each
element which overlaps an element in another hierarchy) begins
and ends. These empty elements have the same name as would
have been used for the equivalent 'normal' element which has
content, and use special attributes, sID= & eID=, to indicate
that an empty element indicates the beginning or the end of a
pseudo-element (see <http://www.mulberrytech.co
m/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2004/DeRose01
EML2004DeRose01.html#t6> ). RelaxNG, the schema
language underlying TEI P5, is perfectly capable of representing
some of the constraints that would desired to validate this type
of markup. However, ODD, the abstract literate encoding
language in which TEI P5 is written, cannot. A mechanism for
permitting TEI P5 RelaxNG schemas to perform some CLIX
validation without changing the ODD language itself, but rather
by using a slightly more complex 'tangle' process to produce
schemas from the ODD sources, will be presented.
The second paper will discuss analytical approaches to
manuscript description and the use of this markup to support
advanced research in quantitative codicology. Data-centric
manuscript description has recently emerged as a topic of
interest in light of the new opportunities provided by electronic
text technology. While traditional printed manuscript
descriptions have been substantially prose-like (a tendency
reflected in more document-centric encoding approaches), the
more analytical approach presented here (which will be adopted
as part of the new TEI chapter on manuscript description) treats
manuscript description as structured databases rendered in
XML. Highly structured descriptions with rich markup of all
descriptive details (using controlled vocabularies wherever
possible) permit users to conduct much more advanced research,
for instance on the correlation between specific watermarks
and specific orthographic norms, or on the resemblance between
manuscripts in a given set of features. These kinds of questions
go well beyond the tradition of consulting indices or searching
for access points, and enable scholars to envision manuscript
transmission in ways that would otherwise be impossible. This
presentation will illustrate both the provisions of the TEI MS
description module and its application to these advanced
research topics.
The third paper will focus on designing and extending document
models with the TEI. It will present the main characteristics of
the new TEI specification platform, which is being used to
describe both the documentation and technical characteristics
of the next edition of the TEI guidelines (P5). The specification
platform (also known as ODD for "One Document Does it all")
allows one to describe elements and their attributes, through a
combination of prose and formal descriptions. It also allows
document model designers to refer to classes of elements, when
similarity of behaviour or semantics have to be taken into
account. The presentation will illustrate the new TEI
architecture by presenting the online environment (Roma) that
allows anyone to design his or her own TEI subset and possibly
extend the TEI capacities by adding or modifying elements and
attributes. We will exemplify these mechanisms in the light of
the new terminology chapter that is to appear in the TEI P5
edition.
The final paper in this panel will present the current landscape
of TEI tools development, and in particular the work of the TEI
Tools Special Interest Group (SIG). It will discuss the current
challenges faced by developers of TEI tools, the genres of tools
which are currently of greatest interest, the ways in which the
TEI community can most effectively assist tool developers (for
instance, by contributing to a library of sample documents for
testing), and the support framework provided by the SIG.