SIG:Correspondence

News

• Now online: "Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf"

• correspDesc, CMIF and correspSearch received in September 2018 the "Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity"!

• Workshop "Introduction to TEI encoding of correspondence meta data" at the TEI conference 2018 in Tokyo, Japan

• Journal article "correspSearch – Connecting Scholarly Editions of Letters" by Stefan Dumont in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 10 (2016)

• Journal article "Towards a Model for Encoding Correspondence in the TEI: Developing and Implementing <correspDesc>" by Peter Stadler, Marcel Illetschko, and Sabine Seifert in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 9 (2016/2017)

• Web Service "correspSearch. Search scholarly editions of letters" online with constantly growing number of data, including the CMIF Creator (Manual) for creating digital indexes of edited letters and the Javascript widget csLink, which links letters automatically across scholarly editions

Introduction

The TEI Special Interest Group on Correspondence seeks to bring together scholars interested in creating digital scholarly editions of correspondence. The goal of the SIG will be to discuss and develop sample tagsets (including suggesting additions/modifications to the TEI Guidelines) for varying forms of correspondence as well as to create tutorials and best practice models.

Because the initiative for this SIG emerged from editorial work with 19th century letters, the organizers of this SIG have focused on these types of materials. However, we want this SIG to be more encompassing, embracing varying types of historical and literary correspondence including epistles, telegrams, postcards, etc., and perhaps other types of documents that share features with physical written correspondence like diaries, diary entries, letters to the editor, e-mail, blogs, etc. The common feature of these sorts of text is a generally formalized physical appearance (e.g., an envelope for letters) and structure of content (i.e. address field, special formulas for opener and closer).

Mailing List

The SIG runs a mailing list, which you can join by visiting http://listserv.brown.edu/tei-corresp-sig.html.

"Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf"

The handbook "Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf" is now published with a first set of articles open access in version 1. It is edited by Stefan Dumont, Susanne Haaf, and Sabine Seifert.

More articles are coming soon, the community has the possibility to review and comment. After the public peer review phase (until April 30, 2020), the articles will be revised and updated, and the handbook will be published in version 2. All articles of version 1 remain online and citable.

Although the TEI Guidelines contain suggestions for the encoding of correspondence materials, there are still open questions on how to deal with several structural and textual occurrences. This handbook shall help editors of digital editions and projects to encode letters and postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf. Topics of discussion are, amongst others, problems with <opener> and <closer>, with postscripts, letterheads, and the expansion of the exchange format CMIF.

The handbook summarizes the discussions and solutions of the workshop "Challenges of Correspondence Encoding" that was held by the TEI Correspondence SIG and CLARIN-D at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in October 2018. The project was also presented at the TEI Conference 2019 in Graz (abstract, slides).

The handbook can be downloaded from GitHub. The bibliographic information of the articles and cited literature are available at the Zotero group Encoding Correspondence.

Bibliography of Digital Correspondence Projects

For a bibliography of TEI-based and non-TEI-based digital correspondence projects, databases and digital scholary editions see our Zotero Group "Digital Correspondence Projects".

The Zotero Group Library is divided in three collections:

• Digital Scholarly Editions
• Databases (i.e. all digital editions that do not contain full text but only references)
• Projects (i.e. correspondence projects that have not yet been published or anything else that does not fit the other two collections)

Furthermore, we have introduced a number of tags to search the Zotero Group for digital publications that meet certain criteria - for example, all TEI-based editions (tag: "TEI-XML") that provide their data (tag: "Data available") under a free license (e.g. tag "CC BY").

Activities

Topics currently under discussion

Regarding meta data in <teiHeader> and/or transcription in <text>:

• handling of envelopes and postal addresses (addresses different in different parts of the world, could this be handled more adequately than just with datelines?)
• how to deal with enclosures/attachments
• pre-printed text, e.g. letterhead, postcard captions

Regarding transcriptional part in <text>:

• content model of opener/closer and their connection with salute, signed, dateline, etc.
• <salute> (in <opener> and <closer>) with restriction, e.g. it is not allowed within

• definition of <signed> does not correspond with its actual use in the P5 guidelines
• content model of <postscript>: look at the Collection of Postscript-Examples and the contributions to the ps-discussion.
• address now in

  but not in <div>: maybe not a good idea

Further future plans

• stylesheet for ‘converting’ <correspDesc> to Correspondence Metadata Interchange format
• provide best-practice model for <text> part
• provide stylesheets for extracting all <correspDesc> elements from a corpus
• taxonomy/thesaurus as a suggestion

GitHub repository

There is a GitHub repository for the SIG Correspondence for
a) the element <correspDesc> (encoding examples, documentation on its development etc.), and
b) the Correspondence Metadata Interchange format (CMIF, encoding examples etc.).

Meetings

Paderborn, Sept 6, 2023

[upcoming metting]

Newcastle, Sept 13, 2022

Attendees

• co-convener Sabine Seifert
• 9 attendees

Encoding Correspondence Manual

• short introduction to “Encoding Correspondence Manual” https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/
• intended as a guide for typical questions and challenges while encoding correspondence
• review process still ongoing, i.e. e.g. the Hypothes.is comment function still available (= ignore the given dates for deadlines 31 July 2021/30 May 2020)
• we editors will resume working on the manual as soon as possible; the initial group of editors (Sabine, Stefan, Susanne) is stable
• question of strategy:
  • review and update papers (=version 2) and after that open github-issues for TEI council, but then reworking of papers needed (=version 3)
  • or leave version 1 as it is, review comments and open github-issues and update papers after implementation in the Guidelines
  • but also others may open issues (ideally referring to the manual) on TEI-GitHub if they wish to see aspects handled rather sooner than later

CMIF (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format)

• Stefan worked on Version 1.1 of the CMIF
• slightly improved schema, also using Schematron
• provides more feedback for the user

• Stefan will soon start working on Version 2 of the CMIF
• will produce an ODD and schema, including feedback to the paper on the CMIF in the manual

• question from participants: Are there XSLT or other re-useable gimmicks to produce CMIF from full-fleshed TEI header files?
  • Stefan Dumont might have one, others are asked to share theirs, if possible. We could collect these resources here https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF/tree/main/templates.

• discussion: How to deal with different versions of “one” letter, e.g. concepts, drafts, copies etc.: should these all be individual CMIF files?
  • open question, to be discussed via SIG Correspondence mailing list https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A0=tei-corresp-sig
• additional question: Where do we record attachments?
  • should be considered while working on next CMIF version; should be put into a GitHub issue https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF/issues
• discussion: CMIF needed for different languages and different alphabets
  • should be considered while working on next CMIF version; should be put into a GitHub issue https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF/issues

correspSearch

• short introduction to web service correspSearch https://correspsearch.net/en/home.html
• developed by SIG co-convener Stefan
• search within metadata of diverse scholarly editions of letters possible, printed or digital
• search for sender, addressee, as well as place and date of the letter's creation
• web service assembles and analyzes files in the Correspondence Metadata Interchange (CMI) format which is based on the TEI extension "correspDesc" developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG.
• currently more than 177.000 letters, with up to 12.000 identified persons

Micro Grants

• TEI Correspondence SIG and web service correspSearch plan to offer 2 Micro Grants in the amount of 450€ each for students and Phd candidates from Central and Eastern Europe, esp. from Ukraine
• financed by Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity 2018 für correspDesc, CMIF & correspSearch
• the result is supposed to be a CMIF file with correspondence metadata to be incorporated in correspSearch and a citable publication at e.g. Zenodo

Graz, Sept 17, 2019

Attendees

• no co-conveners present unfortunately
• Peter Stadler stepped in in hosting this SIG meeting
• a few attendees

Workshop on Encoding Correspondence

• short report on workshop on Encoding Correspondence at Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Humanities and Sciences in October 2018
  • expected outcome: guidelines for encoding correspondence and a manual, published online, with public peer review
  • current phase: internal peer review, first papers will be published later this year for public peer review here: https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/v1/
  • presentation of this project at the TEI conference: „TEI encoding of correspondence: A community effort“ (Dumont, Haaf, Seifert)

CMIF

• further development of CMIF version 2

Tokyo, Sept 11, 2018

Attendees

• Sabine Seifert (University of Potsdam, Germany) as convener
• Peter Stadler (University of Paderborn, Germany)
• Klaus Rettinghaus (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, Germany)

Short introduction

• update of this SIG wiki page
• new Zotero database with collection of digital editions and all kinds of projects dealing with correspondence, will be constantly enriched
• current status of development of web service correspSearch

Collaborative work an GitHub repositories of SIG

• repository correspDesc: repository is about proposal of correspondence model to TEI council with <correspDesc>, therefore now archiving of repository
• repository CMIF: working on and discussing several issues (“make RelaxNG more accessible #15”, “page numbers”, “allow <listBibl> and <biblStruct>”)

Vienna, Sept 29, 2016

- no minutes available

For minutes of further meetings, see page Past Meetings.