Understanding the TEI-C Community

The 2016 Board of Directors would like to initiate a study to help us better understand the TEI Community at-large, and are hoping to partner with someone interested in digital humanities, organizational cultures, and/or textual studies in leading a study that would help us identify understand individuals and their institutional or non-institutional contexts. The following are of special concern to the Board that may help shape the study, but the list is not necessarily complete:

• The Board, historically, is quite insular compared to the Council. Mechanisms are in place for the Council to hear back from the Community, mostly because this input is inherent to standards-development. Aside from experimenting with ways to remedy this for 2017, including forming working groups for all activities — from procedural like Elections to strategic like internationalization initiatives — led by Board members, with membership comprised from the broader community, the Board is interested in exploring new ways to interact with the TEI Community at-large.

• Reframing of the TEI’s strong open-access, open-standards ethos. This is especially problematic when we discuss “member benefits,” but we see our open work to be a primary benefit that is either obfuscated or taken for granted. We would like to explore this “open” value proposition with the community at large and based on the findings (but likely even before as we overhaul our web presence) and consider ways to rally around this.

• TEI training is happening all over the globe, but we don’t really have a good sense of the breadth of our global community. When you look at our member profile and map our conference hash tag, we see a flurry of activity in North America, Europe and a few spots in Australia. However, we know that engagement with the TEI is happening, and its not always broadcasted or at least not through channels like social media, which have their own cultural bias, bullying, and other problems. Tapping into this group would really help us understand who our “individual” members are. As far as membership is concerned, we have one category for individuals, and we should probably think of ways to expand this to reflect who important characteristics of these individuals. We have already discussed creating levels of Individual memberships with some obvious options like student. More than ascribing the proper membership levels, we can finally think of benefits based on a clearer understanding of our audience. We could also better formulate benefits as a result.

• Similar to our individual members, institutions engaging/supporting TEI work stem beyond “the libraries” and DH centers. For years we have been hearing TEI colleagues lamenting the loss of institutional support, especially from libraries. TEI work is happening not only in other sectors of the academy — non-DH research centers, disciplinary departments — but also government agencies (US Office of the Historian Germany with TextGrid, Spain, etc,), and scholarly societies that may not interface with the broader DH crowd. We need to engage in broader outreach and it would help to know where to start.