TEI @ 20 Conference Travelogue

This year the University of Maryland hosted a conference to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), and Eric arranged for Ben Pancierra and me to give a brief presentation on our work with the Digital Scriptorium project which resulted in the marking up of some 350 odd medieval and rennaissance manuscripts in TEI and the creation of a searchable index useful to paleographers and medievalists who may have use for our collection of these manuscripts.For the most part, the weather was beautiful and the McKeldin Library was a very nice venue for the conference. It was hard for me to believe that TEI has been around as long as SGML and the initial stirrings of markup languages back when Timothy Berners-Lee (the gentleman who was really responsible for the "invention" of the Internet) was doing his initial work and long before the W3C was formed as a basis for regulating web standards.

In fact, a few of the people there probably knew Berners-Lee because they had been involved in some of the very early discussions of creating a markup language that was specific to the needs of scholars who work in the highly technical area of textual analysis. SGML was good, but it wasn't nearly good enough as no less than five iterations of the TEI have proven. The relative age of the TEI was a leitmotif of the conference, with recollections, status reports, and predictions being very prominent. Overall, it was worth going to get a sense of the community that has established and nutured TEI and wishes to see it prosper as an "academic" markup language. As a part of the leitmotif, emphasis was also placed on the fact that the TEI community has remained, to a large degree, very insular and has not made great strides toward teaching and marketing the TEI for a broader user base.

The first keynote speaker at the conference, B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies), delivered a rather scathing reprimand for the TEI community: become relevant or fade away. Coming from anyone else at the conference, they probably would have had the shepherds crook immediately wrapped around their waste and dragged from the podium. However, Tommie (as she likes to be called), is what you might call an "old timer" in the markup standards world. From what I understand, she was there twenty to thirty years ago when the initial markup languages were just being formulated, and she was involved in the initial creation of "tools" used to edit and read SGML/HTML. This is long before HTML became the commercial powerhouse that it is today, and long before the "Web" was ubiquitous. These are the days when SGML was of primarily academic interest, and when issues like the "semantic web" were just being conceived. If I could summarize what Tommie had to say, it was basically that the TEI community needed to pull it's head out of the proverbial sand and think about how the next generation of scholars, programmers, and institutional administrators will approach mark up languages in general and the TEI in particular. An example that Tommie gave of the insular nature of the community was the TEI web site (which has been updated for the 20th anniversary of TEI). There are basically no "how to" guides on TEI, there is little to no contact information, the information had been organized poorly, and what information was there was primarily of use to scholars who already knew how to use TEI. Her point was that ultimately if TEI is to remain relevant, the community must become ammenable to the needs of newcomers and must consider the issue of marketing and instruction.

Following the initial plenary talk, Ben and I gave our presentation at the "tools" panel discussion. This panel discussion was intended for folks to learn more about what methodologies and tools are useful for institutions that work on a day to day basis with TEI. The range of presentations was rather diverse and to a greater or lesser degree specific concerning the actual tools that are used. The ND portion of the panel presentations demonstrated how Ben and company created the TEI documents for the Digital Scriptorium project and what tools they used during their editing process and also how we assembled an application (using Java and Lucene, Perl, and XSLT) which allows scholars to search important manuscript fields (such as the incipit and explicit, and do a full keyword search). The two other presentations were vastly different, but I found Paul Schaffner's presentation both comforting and entertaining (as well as informative). Paul works at the University of Michigan where they regularly process hundreds of TEI documents every week. During his presentation, Paul basically demonstrated that even the most simple of tools can be useful if they are efficient when dealing with such a large volume of documents. The workflow that they have in place there does the job, and they have seen no need to get "fancy" with specialized or expensive tools as they review, edit, and process their TEI files. David Sewell, at the University of Virginia Press essentiall demonstrated a tool they have purchased which allows for very sophisticated stemming and thesaurus matches during a search of their TEI documents, of which they have several impressive collections of historical documents.

Other parallel sessions throughout the conference took a look at issues such as "markup as theory", using TEI in heterogenous contexts (GIS, music, etc), TEI education initiatives, and TEI application initiatives. The second TEI plenary talk continued the leitmotif with a look at another of the TEI communities' weaknesses: the distinct lack of TEI examples for educational purposes. Melissa Terras, an instructor from University College, London, gave a very engaging talk on this subject, and it was really a plea from someone who is in the front lines of education acting as an evangelist of sorts for the TEI community. Her students in this regard are primarily professionals who work in the humanities, are librarians or other information specialist personnel who do day to day work with increasing amounts of digital material and need tools such as TEI to help them accomplish their work. Her plea is very similar to Tommie Usdin's: the TEI community needs to become more open to those new to the TEI and markup in general. A new generation of information workers are entering the field, who do not have the extensive background that the existing TEI users have grown accustomed to over the course of the last 20 years, and yet there is a dire need for training and education, both in the theory behind the TEI and by example. Melissa made a very convincing case that there needs to be more examples at all levels of usage from beginner to advanced. And, not only is this information required, but it should be provided by the TEI community itself. Melissa put out a request for the community to submit live examples that they are working on at the various levels of expertise.

The end of the conference was devoted to an exposition of the new P5 standard, and how it extends TEI. Specific examples were given to illustrate how the new standard can be applied, and a brief discussion of how to convert from the older P4 standard into the new P5 standard was given. Although I didn't hear the majority of this discussion, Ben Panceira informed me that it was enlightening and generated several ideas for his own work. The conference concluded with the TEI SIG sessions that focused on tools, libraries, education, ontologies and manuscripts. Overall, the conference was the most well attended conference in TEI history and was praised by the folks who helped organize it.

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