SIG meeting Lyon

TEI SIG on Correspondence - Minutes Lyon, Oct 29, 2015

Status: draft --User: sabine seifert, 06 December 2015 (EST)

Attendees

Attendees gave a short introduction on their ongoing and/or planned projects:

• Peter Stadler: University of Paderborn, Carl Maria von Weber Collected Works
• Sabine Seifert: Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin Intellectuals 1800-1830, Theodor Fontane Archive, University of Potsdam
• Stefan Dumont Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
• Anne Baillot Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin Intellectuals 1800-1830
• Patrizia Rebulla [letters.mozartways.com Université Libre de Bruxelles]
• Anna-Maria Sichani, Dixit Fellow The Hague, Huygens KNAW
• Michel de Gruijter, National Library of the Netherlands
• Angelika Kreh: German Literature Archive Marbach, Epistolary Networks
• Mariana Gomes

Report on last year’s activities

It was a successful year: - further development of <correspDesc> and introduction into the TEI standard - workshop on "Encoding correspondence meta data with <correspDesc>" held at the TEI conference 2015 - accepted article for jTEI: "Towards a model for encoding correspondence in the TEI. Developing and implementing <correspDesc>" by Marcel Illetschko, Sabine Seifert, Peter Stadler (not yet published) - further development of the Correspondence Metadata Interchange format (CMI) - collaboration for the development of the web service correspSearch

Discussion

- SIG for computer-mediated communication: they work on the same problems as we do concerning the meta data and the structure of the communication - Peter: we should join forces with them, <post> element for a tweet or a posting what would be a letter for us, they want to file a feature request for that - they took our <correspAction> and made an attribute out of it - Stefan: just wrote a blog post on CMIF - Anne: meeting of CostAction and Mapping the Republic of Letters, we should talk to Pip Willcox to make correspDesc and correspSearch known - Stefan: in contact with these people - Anne: perhaps we should write a little standard text to send around to make our work known

- Mariana: Does correspSearch accept meta data in other languages? Stefan: with authority files etc. no problem - Peter: information on language of letter in CMIF might be helpful - Patrizia: case of translations of one letter into different languages - Stefan: introducing this feature in correspSearch might be a good idea

- Patrizia asks for a structure that could be copied, for a best-practice model - Peter: this is our next step to develop a best-practice model, already some example online on GitHub and in TEI Guidelines - Maria: We could prepare some stylesheets - Anne: a collection of examples perhaps better because less normative

- Mariana: problems with envelopes, where to encode the occurrence of an envelope - Peter: address can be part of header and also body (normalized data vs. transcription of address) - occurrence of envelope should go into physDesc → example - How does DALF P5 do that? - Mariana: encoding of type of correspondence and attachments, non-textual assets found in the envelope - counter-argument was: type of correspondence belongs to profileDesc - SIG could come up with a taxonomy/thesaurus as a suggestion - perhaps libraries, archives, post museums already have taxonomies - Patrizia: in Paris is a museum of letters and correspondence, with another branch in Brussels - Stefan: ask mailing list

- Peter: possible to create stylesheets to convert regular correspDesc to CMIF - Stefan: use cases for that needed - stylesheets for extracting all correspDescs from a corpus

- Mariana: Do older versions of Oxygen work with correspDesc? - Peter: these files don’t validate, one could update the TEI Add on

Future plans - examples - documentation - taxonomy/thesaurus as a suggestion - best-practice model - stylesheets for extracting all correspDescs from a corpus - long-term goal: textual features