Re: Whither TEI?

I have a response on my blog. http://opensourceexile.blogspot.co.nz/

cheers
stuart


--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 7:00 AM, Martin Mueller <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I have put on my blog at https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/?p=477 an
> essay with the title
> "Whither TEI: The next thirty years." It is too long to include in this
> email, but below I have reproduced the introduction and summary.
>
>
>
> *Whither TEI? The next thirty years*
>
> In the next fifty years the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural
> works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage,
> access, and dissemination (Jerome McGann, 2001)
>
> You have to put the corn where the hogs can get at it (Bill Clinton)
>
> Only the paranoid survive (Andrew Grove)
>
>
> Introduction
>
> At the Digital Humanities 2016 meeting in Cracow it was announced that the
>  triennial Antonio Zampolli Prize will be awarded in 2017 to the TEI
> Community on the occasion of the 30th anniversary  of the Text Encoding
> Initiative, which began its life at a conference at Vassar College in
> 1987.  This is a timely and well-deserved birthday present to the scholars,
> librarians, and IT professionals who have made the TEI an important tool
> for the digital remediation of print and manuscript materials on a global
> scale. The 1994 publication of the TEI Guidelines, edited by Lou Burnard
> and Michael Sperberg-McQueen is surely among the more  consequential
> contributions to humanities scholarship of that decade.
>
> Laurels are a good thing to rest on, but not for long. In the following
> pages I take a critical look at the TEI, focusing on shortcomings and on
> what should be done if the TEI is to do well in the next thirty years. I
> served as program chair for this year’s annual meeting of the TEI in
> Vienna, but it became clear in the summer that I would not be able to make
> it across the Atlantic. So I decided to put down some of my thoughts on
> paper. They are very much my thoughts, with all the advantages and
> disadvantages of personal observations unconstrained by the compromises of
> committee work. Here is a four-point summary of those thoughts:
>
>    1. Beware of complacency.
>    2. Worry about the lack of wide recognition and buy-in from the
>    academic disciplines that are the main consumers of TEI-encoded documents.
>    3. Pay much more attention to the needs of average and novice users.
>    4. Broaden the revenue base and reform an ineffective governance
>    structure.
>
> I served briefly as chair of the TEI Consortium in 2011 and have served on
> its Board for the last five years. Nothing of what I write below will be
> news to the members of the TEI Technical Council and Board, where I have
> played a role somewhere between Cassandra and a Socratic gadfly.  Much of
> it is similar to  an analysis of the TEI that I offered in a public
> letter of August 2011
> <http://ariadne.northwestern.edu/mmueller/teiletter.pdf> to the TEI Board
> and Council. I have reused some of its language, not always with
> attribution.
>
> The TEI Consortium is an international body, but in practice 95% or more
> of its business takes place in Europe or North America. I know more about
> the North American than the European scene, and this report shows it.  It
> seems plausible to me that in the years to come the balance of activities
> may shift towards Europe. TEI is mostly a technology for scholarly editing.
> In the prestige economy of the North American academy the status of
> scholarly editing has declined. This does not seem to be the case in
> Europe—or so it looks from this side of the Atlantic. But such things
> change, and it is difficult for me to envisage a future in which the TEI
> thrives without thriving in North America as well.
>
> Because this is a long document, the following section offers a summary of
> each of its seven distinct sections.
> A summary of findings and recommendations Success and failure: TEI and
> the remediation of cultural heritage texts
>
> The TEI schema can and has been used for a variety of purposes, but it is
> mostly a tool for the remediation of cultural heritage texts, and its
> long-term success depends on its widespread acceptance as a critical tool
> in that enterprise. It has exceeded expectations from one perspective and
> fallen short of it from another. It is the *lingua franca*  of digital
> scholarly editing on a global basis, well recognized by editors and major
> funding agencies. But there is surprisingly little awareness of it among
> the literary scholars, historians, etc. and their students who are the most
> common end users of TEI-encoded texts. This may be truer of North American
> than of European users, but the fact that a high percentage of end users do
> not know or care much about the TEI is not just “a” problem for the TEI. I
> think that it will be the most important problem for the leadership of the
> TEI to confront in the years to come.
> Libraries as financial supporters of the TEI
>
> In the North  American context, humanities departments have no budgets for
> stuff, tools, and services. That is the responsibility of the library, the
> “laboratory of the humanities” in the words of a former Northwestern
> provost.
>
> More than a million dollars went into the creation of the TEI schema
> during its development years. Much of the TEI Consortium’s revenue in the
> early years followed something like a “20 x 5000” formula where four host
> institutions and a group of libraries provided the lion’s share of support
> in the form of $5,000 annual membership fees.  Libraries for a while
> thought of the TEI as a tool for mass-digitization, but their interested
> faded because of technological and financial developments conveniently
> summarized by “Google Books”, “Hathi Trust”, and “2008”.
>
> Libraries have increasingly become the “go to” place for Digital
> Humanities. They are very sensitive to what their patrons want. If they
> hear from faculty and their chairs in history, literature, linguistics, and
> other disciplines that the TEI matters to their scholarly and pedagogical
> work, they will invest in it. If they don’t, they won’t. They are not
> hearing this from them now.
>
> Much text-based work for which TEI is a better solution ends up being done
> as HTML-based web sites, for which there is typically enough locally
> available technical support. Does the TEI want to cede a large chunk of
> editorial work to HTML? The Germans have the useful term *Orchideenfach*
> or orchid subject. I interpret the current trend as moving towards the TEI
> as an *Orchideenfach*.  Is that where we want to go?
> From 20 x 5000 to 200 x 500
>
> The TEI should seek to broaden its base and persuade its ultimate core
> audience–the not particularly digitally savvy faculty and students in
> humanities departments– that any cultural heritage text worth encoding in
> the first place should be encoded in some form of TEI, which may be quite
> simple and will typically not involve the rigor or complexity of a critical
> edition.
>
> Academic libraries remain the most promising site for maintaining the TEI
> competency of a particular institution, but they need to be persuaded that
> there is  a market for such a competency and that it is technically and
> financially feasible. The TEI should develop a “200 x 500” campaign that
> would seek to triple the current institutional membership. A credible
> commitment to lowering entry barriers for TEI-based work should overcome
> the free-rider problem and persuade enough institutions to make
> modest contributions.
> Heretical asides about money
>
> The four American libraries that are still “sustaining partners” of the
> TEI would do the consortium a long-term favour if they reduced their
> contributions to $500.00 or at most $1,000.00 a year. This would not cause
> an immediate financial crisis but would be a strong incentive to work
> towards a more broadly based revenue model.
>
> Individual subscriptions make up only 5% of revenue of TEI revenue. It is
> unlikely that they ever will add up to more than 10%. I would argue for
> going out of the business of individual subscriptions altogether and
> focusing the Consortium’s limited time and energy exclusively on what it
> can do for institutions and what in return it can get from them in the form
> of modest but broadly based contributions.
> Back to the future: a new version of TEI Lite
>
> TEILite, an 80/20 TEI schema published in 1996, was very successful.  It
> has had half-hearted support from the Consortium in recent years, but the
> time has come to:
>
>    1. Revise TEILite in the context of the two decades that have passed
>    since it was first released in 1996.
>    2. Add the Processing Model that was developed by the late Sebastian
>    Rahtz.
>    3. Make the maintenance of this version a continuing first-order item
>    of business for the TEI.
>    4. Document this version in a manner that is independent of the
>    Guidelines.
>    5. Offer concrete help with the integration of encoded texts into
>    existing Web environments.
>    6. Claim that version as a central property of the TEI and build
>    around it a strategy for extending its user base and staying in touch with
>    the novice or average users without whose awareness and support the TEI is
>    unlikely to thrive, whether from a scholarly or financial perspective.
>
> This entry-level version should be the text-encoding equivalent of a
> family practice in medicine or a Subaru Outback in transportation.
> Outreach, outreach, and outreach
>
> With the rapid and quite spectacular rise of the DH conference in recent
> years, the tradition of annual TEI meetings should be re-examined from the
> perspective of “outreach, outreach, and outreach” as the most important
> challenge. There is much to be said in favour of joining the DH conference
> and seeking a greater presence at other meetings. In the North American
> context, the TEI should seek “allied organization” status at the MLA, which
> would guarantee it at least one session at every meeting. Similar
> arrangements should be explored with the professional societies of
> historians, classicists, and linguists. There are opportunities for working
> with the Society for Textual Scholarship <https://textualsociety.org> .
> Workshops at regional or national Library meetings are something worth
> looking into. A survey of the European scene might come up with comparable
> solutions.
> Governance issues
>
> There are serious governance issues that need addressing. The TEI Council
> works well within its current understanding of its role. But I question
> whether it still makes to sense to restrict the work of the Council to the
> maintenance of the TEI schema and leave the rest to the “community.”  The
> Board has not worked well. It has not been good at raising money, and it
> does not consist of people who either have money to give or have access to
> people with money. It has not developed effective and asynchronous ways of
> getting business done in a timely manner. It has largely failed to think
> strategically about long-term goals. The Board has been well aware of its
> problems for some time. Solutions are less obvious. The biggest governance
> failure, however, has been the lack of as significant engagement between
> Board and Council. They are like ships passing in the night. I still see
> considerable virtue in my 2011 proposal for a unicameral board of
> directors, composed of technical and nontechnical people. In such an
> arrangement the relationship between the technology and its nontechnical
> end users would be written into the sovereign body of the organization as
> an explicit and continuing challenge.
> Martin Mueller
> Professor emeritus of English and Classics
> Northwestern University
>