LingSIG in Würzburg, Oct 2011

Annual meeting of the LingSIG. Friday 14 October 2011 11-12.30, Würzburg

Main outcomes:

• LingSIG bibliography report (Maik Stührenberg and Antonina Werthmann) [slides with Zotero info and mini-tutorial]
• general remarks on the benefits of communication and joint work on SIG-related issues (Piotr Bański, Andreas Witt) [slides]
• micropresentations + discussion:
  • Werner Wegstein [slides]
  • Sebastian Drude [slides]
  • Martin Wynne [slides]

• jTEI call for papers

Meeting Minutes

1. Opening and introductions

• Andreas Witt presented a brief introduction of the SIG and its first year of life since the meeting in Zadar.
• Introduction round

2. Past year activities

• TEI-journal issue 3 -- special issue TEI for linguists
  • 4 articles at the moment, 3 more 'promised'
  • further articles may be accepted as well -- do contact us about the deadline arrangements
• LingSIG bibliography effort: collection of bibliography of works related to the area addressed by SIG, this happened very slowly, we were not able to decide on the form of the bibliography, time was a big issue. The bibliography should help understand the relationship between the TEI and other specifications.

3. LingSIG bibliography

• Presentation by Maik Stührenberg and Antonina Werthmann:
  • Zotero Group "TEI-LingSIG" is open for collaboration.
  • Maik gives instructions to setup Zotero (Firefox plugin). The group has main categorizations. There is also a Firefox plugin that does zotero-to-tei.
  • There is also a zotero plugin for word/oo to to import bibliographies from word processors.

• Discussion about zotero-to-tei-exporter plugin:
  • Stefan Majewski who developed the tool (zotero to tei) asks for people to point out bugs before he push the tool to zotero for their standalone version. Send recommendations and suggestions to Stefan (stefan.majewski @ UNIVIE.AC.AT).
  • L. Romary suggests also a BiblStruct importer.
  • Open LingSIG zotero group -- issues such as accidental deletion etc., Piotr recommends copying the group library to private library as decentralized backup copy (this is not a perfect solution, but at least one that works)

4. General Issues

Piotr Bański addresses the attendees with a presentation:

• TEI LingSIG mailing list needs more traffic as a means of communication for the SIG members and a basis for extended cooperation or at least an expression of common stance in issues raised in SF tickets.
• Reminder of what a SIG 'does' and of how this relates to what SIG conveners can do, and of how important it is for members to know what others do.
• Do we need a subtitle to better define the SIG, let's discuss this on the mailing list (time was too short for local brainstorming)
• short discussion about splitting the SIG among varieties of linguistic disciplines -> rejection by both Piotr and Laurent Romary (and possibly the larger part of the group as well)
• Communication: Andreas Witt: we need to collect information about linguistic projects using the TEI on the LingSIG wiki

5. Micropresentations

(cf. the call)

• Werner Wegstein [slides] - Baseline Encoding for Parallel Corpora.

  The motivation of the parallel corpora and its function were briefly explained. An example was presented with a call for feedback.

• Sebastian Drude [slides] - The 'Digital Grammar' Project: Integrating the Wiki/CMS approach with Language Archiving Technology and TEI.

  The Project describes the interface between Language description, Computer linguistics and Language documentation. Some of the project's aims are for example to link exemplars to multi-media utterances in a corpus or Lexical units to an online-lexicon or to separate the different levels of the grammatical description. The possibility has been raised to describe the digital grammar with the TEI.

  • TEI LingSIG grant possible for creating documentaion TEI for linguistics / parallel corpora (Lou Burnard)

• Martin Wynne [slides] "TEI or not TEI?" - presented by Piotr - focused on the advantages and disadvantages of using the TEI, with opinions coming from the heart of the CLARIN project, which has adopted it as one of its endorsed standards. The main question was whether it makes sense to use the TEI. The main disadvantages were the cost and complexity compromises to text integrity.

6. Closing remarks

We possibly need two 1.5h slots next time. That, naturally, depends on whether the level of participation remains at least the same, and on whether we have something new to report and discuss as a group.