Readers of this newsgroup (or list) may be interested in the recent publication of the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The material below describes what the Guidelines are and why you might care about them; appended is a description of how to acquire them in paper form or retrieve them in electronic form. Please feel free to re-post this material to other appropriate lists and groups. My apologies if this information is tangential to the interests of the list, or you have already seen it before, especially if it has already been posted here --- my record keeping has been disrupted. Thanks. -CMSMcQ ----- TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE PUBLISHES GUIDELINES In May, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) published its "Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange." This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial software packages. The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse of data among researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts is an expensive and time-consuming business. The object of the TEI was to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete. This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly evolving computer industry. To make them "future-proof", the TEI Guidelines use an international standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML was originally developed by the publishing industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software developers, publishers, and government agencies. It is one of the enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take shape. The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals. They must be both easily extensible and easily simplified. And their aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in all languages and writing systems, from any period in history. Consequently, the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama, and other performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks. The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed texts. The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added to the set of basic recommendations. These include methods for encoding hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts), representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates, representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing of texts for corpus-linguistic study. The Guidelines also define methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity. The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share their experience in using computers and to work out the specific recommendations in the Guidelines. The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics, which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and researchers worldwide. Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the world of humanities scholarship. The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the Internet. For more information see the description of availability and distribution mechanisms appended below. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Availability and Distribution of the TEI Guidelines TEI P3, the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, is available in the following forms: - in paper (1300 pp., 2 volumes), at a cost of $75 US, 50 pounds sterling, or 7500 yen. Order form below. - electronically in an SGML-tagged form (ca. 5.6 Mb) using the TEI DTD documented in TEI P3, with minor extensions; this form is available without cost via Listserv or anonymous ftp. More info below. - electronically in a formatted 'ASCII-only' version (ca. 3.1 Mb) suitable for display by those without an SGML-aware rendering engine; this form is available without cost via Listserv or anonymous ftp. The TEI document type definition (DTD) files are available electronically via Listserv or anonymous ftp. The electronic forms of the documentation are available via Listserv commands from [log in to unmask], and by anonymous ftp from: ftp-tei.uic.edu (in pub/tei and its subdirectories) sgml1.ex.ac.uk (in tei/p3 and its subdirectories) TEI.IPC.Chiba-u.ac.jp (in /TEI/P3) ftp.ifi.uio.no (in pub/SGML/TEI) For instructions on using ftp, consult your local documentation. For instructions on using Listserv, see below. For further information about the TEI, subscribe to TEI-L (see below for instructions). -------- Getting electronic copies of the files from Listserv To fetch TEI P3 from the TEI-L file server maintained at the University of Illinois at Chicago, send electronic mail to [log in to unmask] containing one or more of the following lines. To order the SGML-tagged version of TEI P3, include the line get teip3 package To order the formatted, untagged (ASCII-only) version of TEI P3, include get p3ascii package To order the TEI P3 DTD files, include get p3dtds package If you want ALL THREE packages (SGML-tagged, formatted, and DTDs), you may include all three of the lines given above, or the single line get p3all package For further information on using the file server, include the line get edj8 memo or consult the materials Listserv sent you when you subscribed to TEI-L. If you are not already subscribed, you can subscribe by including the following line in your note to [log in to unmask]: subscribe tei-l J. Doe (substituting your name for 'J. Doe') -------- Getting paper copies of TEI P3 To get paper copies of TEI P3, send the order form below to the appropriate address, enclosing appropriate payment. ORDER FORM Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3, May 1994) Name: Organization: Street: City: Postcode/ZIP: Please supply ..... copies of TEI P3 at (check one) .. Standard Price: ($75/50 pounds/7500 Yen) .. Discount Price, for members of ACH, ACL, or ALLC: ($50/35 pounds/5000 Yen) ...... Shipping and handling Charges Parcel Post (no charge) Surface/first class ($10 per copy/10 pounds per copy) ...... Express delivery within Europe/North America only: ($30 per copy / 20 pounds per copy) ...... Total sum enclosed: __________________ Send this form to the nearest of the following: C. M. Sperberg McQueen University of Illinois at Chicago Academic Computing Center (M/C 135) 1940 W. Taylor, Rm. 124 Chicago IL 60612-7352 U.S.A. N.B. Payments to the Chicago office must be by check in US Dollars payable to the Association for Computers and the Humanities. OR TEI Orders Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN N.B. Payments to the Oxford office must be by cheque or money order in sterling or US Dollars, payable to Oxford University Computing Services. OR Prof. Syun Tutiya Faculty of Letters Chiba University 1-33 Yayoi-cho Inage-ka Chiba 263 JAPAN fax: +81 (43) 256-7032 N.B. Payments to the Chiba office must be in yen; for details, please contact Prof. Tutiya by email ([log in to unmask]) or by fax: +81 (43) 256-7032.