Minutes from October 3, 2013

Attendees

• Glenn Worthey, Stanford University
• Kiyonori Nagasaki, International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo
• Martin de la Iglesia, Göttingen State and University Library
• Dawn Childress, Pennsylvania State University
• Syd Bauman, Northeastern University
• Kevin Hawkins (Convener), University of Michigan
• Michelle Dalmau (Convener), Indiana University

Action Items

• Update level 2 example; currently incorrect example linked (Kevin)
• Confirm why level 1 does not meet abstract model (Kevin/Syd)
• Verify whether level 2 meets the abstract model (Kevin/Syd)

Introductions

• Glen Worthey, Stanford Libraries
  • Would like to explore ways to connect the various libraries-related digital humanities interest groups like ADHO for Libraries, ACRL Digital Humanities, and DLF
  • Poster slam (ADHO DH & Libraries SIG)
  • Proliferation of these organizations may be unnecessary; look for ways to combine or coordinate with the others group
• Martin de la Iglesia, Göttingen State and University Library
  • Natural for librarian like him to support TEI work; advocates librarian involvement in DH projects.
• Kiyonori Nagasaki, International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo
  • Interested in dissemination of TEI among Japanese researchers and how to include librarians in this.
• Dawn Childress, Penn State
  • Doesn’t do anything as part of her job related to TEI but works independently on faculty research projects that feature TEI
  • Many faculty members want to create descriptive and/or annotated bibliographies online, which has led her to create the Open Bibliography Project (modeled on TEI).
• Low-barrier solution for publishing bibliographies for the Web
• RDF-based
• Controlled vocabularies and ontologies
  • Syd wants it open source to plug into TAPAS
• Syd Bauman, Northeastern, Senior Programmer/Analyst
  • These days writes code almost only in XSLT and Bash.
  • Does TEI all the time!
• Michelle Dalmau, IU, manages several TEI projects, contributor to the Best Practices
  • Reported on some data that would not be covered in Michelle’s and Kevin’s presentation the following day re: use of TEI in libraries
• Kevin Hawkins, Michigan
  • Michigan as one of the first, early mid-90s e-text producers
  • Moved toward light encoding (level 1/2); “not real TEI” though a cost-effective measure for broad access to texts
  • Summed up Best Practices work

On Bibliographies

• Kevin reminds us that the TEI Bibliography has moved to Zotero
  • Exports TEI (using the Firefox plugin, which exports each citation as a biblStruct). There’s an XSLT which wraps this in the code needed for the bibliography on the TEI website
  • Zotero is a good tool for strictly bibliographic citation management
• Zotero has limitations
  • Flat list of fields
  • Descriptive fields dump to “notes;” no semantic support of descriptive bibliographies
• Descriptive notes
• Annotation, etc.
  • Dawn Childress is advocating on behalf of the humanist bibliographers who view bibliographies as scholarly documents
• Syd mentions the Barlach Bibliography as a TEI-based bibliography
  • Processing done by Quinn Dombrowski. Was once featured as part of Project Bamboo.

On Best Practices

• Kevin finds level 2 example; needs to update link in the best practices
• Level 1 does not meet the Abstract model; level 2 may not either…
• ODD/Schema enforce practices that are merely suggested in the prose. This promotes consistent encoding
• Still not enough awareness about the Best Practices: how can they be adapted or modified for non-North American perspectives?
• SIG grant could pay for a savvy student to formally place feature requests to the TEI-Council via SourceForge; same student could update best practices to align with latest P5 updates (http://tinyurl.com/lssy47v)

On “TEI-Nudge”

• A recent post to TEI-L authored by Martin Mueller, Northwestern (member of TEI Board)
• Quick Overview (but no one read the entire blog post at the time of meeting)
  • Library community better served to be circulating documents at some base-level
  • Quick discussion of what Sebastian calls a processing model for TEI
  • Michelle said that at IU, we have in place something like a “level 3” processing level so we can publish and query all text collections; while adding more sophisticated functionality for digital pedagogy or research in parallel, at a later stage or using other tools
• Dichotomy at this conference
  • Customization
  • Interoperability
• Closer to interoperability …. Create a version of the TEI for exchange; keep richer version for local needs
• Kevin said that In claiming that the TEI can work for many texts, the message of the utility of the TEI is muddled; if we instead focused on TEI for reformatting pre-existing documents (rather than born-digital … ), the case for when to use TEI would be clearer to the broader world. But Syd noted that the TEI also has special capabilities for encoding born-digital dictionaries and other such documents without a discrete source document.
• Kevin noted that HathiTrust has replaced level 1 for its member institutions, using METS, raw OCR, and page images; he added that HathiTrust is likely to develop something akin to level 2 at some point.
• Kevin suggested that the TEI might reimagine the Guidelines as an abstract model and then expect communities of practice to develop their own application profile, akin to how Dublin Core and METS work.

Thutmose II

• Thutmose II: XSLT for transforming MARC XML into TEI Headers …
  • Need a way to transform the opposite direction
• MARC to TEI (for cataloging for digital version)
• Another SIG grant possibility
  • Unclear how the MARC-to-header style sheets are being used if at all

Manifesto

• Developed last year as a way to secure library stakeholder by-in for the TEI
• A draft was shared on the TEI-L and TEILIB-L lists, but no contributions were made
• Too much of North American bias?
• May be irrelevant today
• We should have a quick look to determine whether or how to move forward with this document [1]