Re: Whither TEI?

Following up on Michelle’s comments about Make it Easy (1):  the postmodern sensibilities   characteristic of the world in which the TEI lives like “many” and “more” better than “one”.  I buy that, but I’m also attracted to the “whatever else” argument. Many years ago John Knott, then the chair of English at Michigan,  described his department as a “holding company.”  That’s even more true of English departments today—or, for that matter of departments of the vernacular literature everywhere, and of other disciplines as well.  Faculty in literature, history, philosophy, religion, Art History etc. like to think of themselves as ever so much ore inter- and multi-disciplinary. The early 20th scholars associated with the Warburg Institute might smile at that, but that’s another matter.

Whatever else faculty in Literature, Art History, and Music do, they must deal respectively with text, visual objects (or their images), and music. In thinking about outreach and marketing, the “whatever else” argument offers a useful point of departure and return. Call it the Antaeus principle, the giant who could not be defeated as long as he stayed in touch with this mother earth. 

Whatever else the TEI may be doing, it is a technology in the service of cultural memory and more specifically its written manifestations. Libraries and library-like institutions, such as museums or local and regional history societies are the cultural memory institutions par excellence. Their collective resources are larger by orders of magnitude than special purpose national funding bodies (DFG, NEH, Mellon) or consortia of various kinds (DARIAH, CLARIN etc.  If the TEI doesn’t have a strong foothold in the daily life of those cultural memory institutions, it won’t thrive. And never forget that for individuals interested in cultural memory work, the library, whether local or academic, is likely to be the go-to place. That won’t change even though are deep and continuing changes in what libraries and librarians do. To the extent that libraries are becoming people places rather than book warehouses, their role as mediators and tutors of cultural memory technologies will increase. And TEI is a cultural memory technology, whatever else it may also be. 

Local or regional history societies are a type of cultural memory institution worth going after. There is an enormous amount of work for “citizen scholars” to do.  This is work often motivated by family interests. My wife’s great-grandfather was a farmer in Henry County, Indiana. She is fascinated by the diary he kept for several decades and has toyed with the idea of transcribing it. It’s a natural for a TEI project, especially if you think of it as joining other documents transcribed by great-granchildren at a time of their life when looking back is a source of pleasure. Ben Brumfield’s work is interesting in that regard. 

 

On 10/3/16, 9:27 AM, "TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list on behalf of Dalmau, Michelle Denise" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:

    Thank you, Stuart.
    
    
    
    The Board has been talking lots about:
    
    
    
    Scale 1:
    
    * our call for the social media coordinator went unanswered this year so we need to re-think how we entice a) coordinator, but the broader community to participate.  Some of us on the Board, me included, feel that this role is important, others feel less so.  I think we should think of this role as a broader “communications” person and maybe it needs to be a constellation of 4-5 people with one “chairing” or “coordinating.”  
    
    
    
    Scale 2:
    
    * encourage proposal from hosts from outside Europe/North America (and the first step is to vastly improve our call for host process, which is in progress — but will be in place at least a month before we issue the call for 2018/2019 in January)
    
    * we might consider other (remote) ways to participate in the conference because we need to really encourage greater amount of paper proposals … I will add your suggestion for one of the upcoming Board meetings so we can think through this some more
    
    * The Board has finally taken much of it’s business to the wiki [1] so agendas are always visible and in progress but I agree that having the Business Meeting agenda set at least a month before is a good idea 
    
    
    
    Make it East (1):
    
    * Noted … and I appreciate the clarification between access to content v/ access to statistics.  One point I have been reiterating lately is that many of us in the TEI community to take our open-source, open-access existence for granted (some even feel that because so much of our work is open, what’s the benefit of membership?) but I think as part of our web site redesign, if not sooner, we need to reframe our open ethos … Libraries especially but perhaps other institutions often get behind projects/initiatives because they are indeed open (greater good thinking).  
    
    
    
    * the Board has noted that the way for libraries to especially to join or renew is to get faculty and grad students behind the TEI — no doubt
    
    
    
    * the Board as a whole would like to look beyond “libraries” as a main target for membership … we have government sponsored TEI activities around the world, research centers, consortia, etc. that we should focus on as much or more so than libraries.  
    
    
    
    Make it Easy (2):
    
    * Also noted … 
    
    
    
    Make it East (3):  
    
    * TEI Libraries SIG had a Thutmose initiative led largely by Michael Sperberg-McQueen that stalled a bit.  As co-chair of the SIG during that time, we were planning on making it an open offering.  :-)  Recent discussions with others at the conference (especially a discussion with Charlotte Roueché during a break) may make this work worth revisiting.  The Libraries SIG is working hard to being the best practices up to date, but I will point them to this discussion.
    
    
    
    Make it Easy (4):
    
    * Yes … the Board, especially Martin, has been discussing this in terms of other disciplinary conferences (not just English Lit/Linguistics)
    
    * The rest of your points have been noted.
    
    
    
    Thank you for your response.  I will be collecting these to address with the Board, and some jointly with Board/Council, including feedback we heard at the business meeting.  
    
    
    
    —Michelle
    
    
    
    PS  Sorry for my haste and typos.  I am home with two VERY SICK kids.  :-)  
    
    
    
    [1] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__wiki.tei-2Dc.org_index.php_TEI-2DC-5FBoard-5Fof-5FDirectors&d=CwIGaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=rG8zxOdssqSzDRz4x1GLlmLOW60xyVXydxwnJZpkxbk&m=oYtn4gizwVIaJBcZ3XCGtY9oCn-GSDy9otlqj7LTdo0&s=JVeN8GnAIihc0RXZsgk6o5ddta9d1ux8V01ECtdzVto&e= 
    
    
    
    > On Oct 2, 2016, at 10:54 PM, Stuart A. Yeates <[email protected]> wrote:
    
    > 
    
    > I have a response on my blog. https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__opensourceexile.blogspot.co.nz_&d=CwIGaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=rG8zxOdssqSzDRz4x1GLlmLOW60xyVXydxwnJZpkxbk&m=oYtn4gizwVIaJBcZ3XCGtY9oCn-GSDy9otlqj7LTdo0&s=kWeQiKmX13gpJ2r_N4uP7Zk93HoSpe2h_U3Rm_AITzE&e= 
    
    > 
    
    > 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:
    
    > 
    
    > 	• Beware of complacency.
    
    > 	• Worry about the lack of wide recognition and buy-in from the academic disciplines that are the main consumers of TEI-encoded documents.
    
    > 	• Pay much more attention to the needs of average and novice users.
    
    > 	• 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 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:
    
    > 
    
    > 	• Revise TEILite in the context of the two decades that have passed since it was first released in 1996. 
    
    > 	• Add the Processing Model that was developed by the late Sebastian Rahtz.
    
    > 	• Make the maintenance of this version a continuing first-order item of business for the TEI.
    
    > 	• Document this version in a manner that is independent of the Guidelines.
    
    > 	• Offer concrete help with the integration of encoded texts into existing Web environments.
    
    > 	• 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 . 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
    
    >