I'm washington at the moment, in the TEI@20 conference. Actually, I'm writing this at the back of the lecture room, with one ear cocked to a panel session about funding for digital humanities.
I gave a plenary paper this morning about TEI by Example, which I think went down ok (phew).
One of the things which came out of the comments and questions is the importance of producing introductory materials which show *why* you would bother with this whole TEI markup malarky - getting across a few examples not only of markup but of what you can do once you have marked something up. For those learning TEI, grasping this can really suck people in. My students eye's light up when the penny drops about *why* you go to all this bother, and see the type of transformations and analysis that TEI encoding affords.
Which is something we at TEI by Example must address. hmmmm.
This is one of the things we were hoping to demonstrate with the multiple views feature of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias online publication. As well as being able to view or download the source EpiDoc (TEI) XML either from each inscription page or as a single Zip file, one can also view the text of each inscriptions in three transformations (each generated directly from the source XML): (1) Interpretive edition, the view that everyone expects to see in an epigraphic or papyrological publication; (2) diplomatic edition, the same content but with all editorial interpretation removed--so no spaces, diacritics, lower case, restorations or supplements, expansions, etc.--; and (3) EpiDoc version, showing a simplified view of the TEI which encodes all textual and editorial features of the transcription (but suppressing all tagging of names, words, indexable subjects, keywords, etc.).
ReplyDeleteScholars reading this edition might be a little bemused by this feature, but we find it very useful as an EpiDoc (and therefore TEI) teaching tool.
Even if the texts are in that pesky ancient Greek. :P