SIG:Correspondence/minutes-evanston

TEI SIG on Correspondence - Minutes Evanston, Oct 22, 2014
Status: draft --User: Marcel Illetschko 13:45, 10 November 2014 (EST)

Attendees
Attendees very briefly introduced themselves and their ongoing and/or planned projects:
 * Marcel Illetschko: Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library, Correspondence Sauer – Seuffert
 * Andy Jewell: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Willa Cather Archive
 * Angelika Kreh: German Literature Archive Marbach, Epistolary Networks
 * Anne Lorenz: German Literature Archive Marbach, Epistolary Networks
 * Elena Pierazzo: Université de Grenoble 3 'Stendhal', King’s College London
 * Sabine Seifert: Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin Intellectuals 1800-1830
 * Peter Stadler: ([]) University of Paderborn, Carl Maria von Weber Collected Works
 * Magdalena Turska: University of Oxford, DiXiT
 * Laura Weakly: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, William F. Cody Archive , Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt

Discussion of 
The SIG meeting took place right after the presentation of the proposed new &lt;correspDesc&gt; element by Sabine, Marcel and Peter. It started – actually before a short introduction by Peter and a brief insight in ongoing projects by the attendees – with Andrew’s question about the general procedure to include new elements in the TEI. Elena pointed out the importance of doing first things first: The new proposal should focus on the most important parts of &lt;correspDesc&gt;, other elements could be implemented afterwards. In general it was very useful to inform the council quite early or to invite members of the council to participate in the development of new elements since on the one hand their experience is helpful and on the other hand the council gets first-hand information. We also discussed minor topics as the encoding of envelopes and address lines and the different views on these questions (Elena: envelopes sometimes get re-used and therefore have a “life themselves”, Magdalena: in the 16th century there were no envelopes at all so the usage of &lt;div&gt; is appropriate, Elena and Peter: one needs to clearly distinguish between the metadata (e.g. dates) derived from the envelopes and the text on the envelope itself). Andy expressed his hope that minor issues concerning the encoding of correspondence could be implemented more quickly. After all one could see that there is a strong international demand for the implementation of the proposed &lt;correspDesc&gt; element. Laura provided an example from the Neihardt collection for testing with the current correspDesc proposal.

Organisational matters
Please add editions to our wiki ! The TEI small grant initiative is still active – maybe a workshop for the development of a best practice model for correspondence would be helpful.