-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
Copy pathintroduction.xml
218 lines (218 loc) · 13.6 KB
/
introduction.xml
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" xml:id="introduction">
<teiHeader>
<fileDesc>
<titleStmt>
<title>Introduction</title>
<author key="dumont">Stefan Dumont</author>
<author key="haaf">Susanne Haaf</author>
<author key="seifert">Sabine Seifert</author>
</titleStmt>
<publicationStmt>
<publisher>Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities</publisher>
<date when="2019-12-15"/>
<idno type="urn">urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-20200110163942154-1974512-7</idno>
<idno type="url">https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/v1/introduction.html</idno>
<idno type="zotero"
>https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/CGIQCIKJ</idno>
</publicationStmt>
<seriesStmt>
<title type="main">Encoding Correspondence.</title>
<title type="sub">A Manual for encoding letters and postcards in TEI-XML and
DTABf</title>
<editor>Stefan Dumont</editor>
<editor>Susanne Haaf</editor>
<editor>Sabine Seifert</editor>
<idno type="urn">urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-20200110163329488-8695229-7</idno>
<idno type="url">https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/v1/</idno>
<biblScope unit="edition">v1</biblScope>
</seriesStmt>
<sourceDesc>
<p>Born digital.</p>
</sourceDesc>
</fileDesc>
<revisionDesc>
<listChange>
<change n="1" when="2019-10-10" status="draft">Initial Version</change>
</listChange>
</revisionDesc>
</teiHeader>
<text>
<body>
<div xml:id="c-1">
<p n="1">Whether letters, postcards, telegrams, e-mails, sms, or
chats—correspondence between different agents is and for a very long time has
been a crucial part of everyday’s life with just as much impact on private as on
work and public lives. Naturally, already before the permeation of technology in
our society, written correspondence captured vast amounts of people’s time. And
today, the direct and simple ways of digital communication are used even more
extensively.</p>
<p n="2">As for historical correspondence, we gain insight in this extremely
productive area by letters passed on to us which were written by scholars,
politicians, artists, celebrities, or private persons. This way, we do not only
learn about the impact of correspondence by the sheer amount of documents
available in archives. These documents are also witnesses of peoples’ broad
networks and of the topics which concerned them. They deliver insight in private
views on public affairs as well as in everyday’s problems of historical persons
of interest.</p>
<p n="3">Thus, and not surprisingly, historical documents of communication quite
frequently have become the subject of humanities’ research and are prepared in
scholarly editions in order to enable and facilitate further research. Since
nowadays editions are usually digital-born and, most of the time, also remain
digital, this area has increasingly been attracting the attention of the <ref
target="https://tei-c.org/">Text Encoding Initiative</ref> community.
Letters, for instance, may appear quite homogeneously structured at first sight
but—as transient documents—tend to exhibit various peculiarities and exceptions
from customary practice. And more generally, the available text types for
communication changed over time, the text types themselves changed in their
specific style and structuring as did the contexts in which these text types
were typically used.</p>
<p n="4">As conveners of the <ref
target="https://tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/Correspondence/">TEI Correspondence
Special Interest Group (SIG)</ref><note n="1" xml:id="fn1">See also <ref
target="https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:Correspondence">the Wiki
page of the TEI Correspondence SIG</ref>.</note> and representative for
the <ref target="http://deutschestextarchiv.de/doku/basisformat/">Deutsches
Textarchiv (DTA) Base Format</ref> (Haaf/Geyken/Wiegand 2014/15), we were
repeatedly asked about the TEI encoding of correspondence-specific phenomena. In
2015, the TEI Correspondence SIG had already addressed some of the problems with
TEI encoding correspondence by introducing a new correspondence model to the TEI
Guidelines with <gi>correspDesc</gi> and its several child elements
(Stadler/Illetschko/Seifert 2016).<note n="2" xml:id="fn2">Also cf. the TEI
Guidelines, <ref
target="https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html#HD44CD"
>chapter 2.4.6: Correspondence Description</ref>.</note> The DTA Base
Format, which had started off as a format for printed texts, was opened to
manuscript texts and enriched with markup for manuscript-specific phenomena in
2016 so that, among other things, it enables the integration of handwritten or
typed (in addition to printed) letters in the DTA text corpus (Haaf/Thomas
2017).</p>
<p n="5">Apart from mere correspondence annotation, there also was and is a growing
demand to effectively link correspondence editions and projects in order to
reveal correspondence networks of the ‘Republic of Letters’ and beyond. This
desideratum led to the creation of the <ref
target="https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF">Correspondence
Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF)</ref>—a constrained subset of the full
TEI standard of the <gi>correspDesc</gi> element—and to the development of the
web service <ref target="https://correspsearch.net/">correspSearch</ref> (Dumont
2016) with CMIF as exchange format. In 2018, the Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity
was granted to the developers of the <gi>correspDesc</gi> encoding model, the
CMIF and correspSearch.<note n="3" xml:id="fn3">Namely to Stefan Dumont, Sascha
Grabsch, Marcel Illetschko, Jonas Müller-Laackman, Sabine Seifert, and Peter
Stadler, <ref
target="https://tei-c.org/activities/rahtz-prize-for-tei-ingenuity/."
>https://tei-c.org/activities/rahtz-prize-for-tei-ingenuity/</ref>.</note></p>
<p n="6">However, there are still open questions on how to deal with several
structural and textual occurrences, and work on creating an exhaustive
environment for the TEI encoding of letters is not yet finished. As a next step,
we decided to hold a workshop on these “Challenges of Letter Encoding” which
would provide a forum for further discussions on problematic cases of
correspondence encoding in TEI. The aim was to develop solutions and best
practices within the range of possibilities already offered by the TEI, and, if
necessary, to produce suggestions of potential extensions to the TEI.</p>
<p n="7">The workshop was funded by CLARIN-D and was held at the Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in Berlin (Germany) in October 2018.
We invited early-career researchers who deal with TEI encoding and/or especially
correspondence encoding in the course of their daily work, as well as one member
of the TEI Council for advice on proposals for TEI extensions. Some 20
participants from 15 institutions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland got
together for the workshop.</p>
<p n="8">Before the event, we gathered examples of insecurities or problems with
applying TEI to correspondence texts from the participants, which were then
dealt with in the course of the workshop. Based on this material, we formed five
groups of (roughly) related encoding issues, and 4-5 participants per group were
asked to discuss the given issues: <list>
<item>Group I: Text structures I (dealing with openers, closers,
postscripts)</item>
<item>Group II: Text structures II (dealing with pre-printed parts like
letterheads, addresses, stamps, seals, postcards etc.)</item>
<item>Group III: Metadata I (dealing with attachments, roles like author,
scribe, and sender, actions like commenting etc.)</item>
<item>Group IV: Metadata II (dealing with unclear information)</item>
<item>Group V: CMIF and Metadata (dealing with the extension of CMIF,
authority files and modelling correspondence in RDF)</item>
</list></p>
<p n="9">The meeting was designed as a hands-on workshop, enabling the groups of
participants to discuss the issues and material presented to them and to develop
solutions. These sessions of group work were alternating with plenary sessions
for discussions of problems and solutions across groups. All issues discussed
concerned aspects of letter or postcard encoding: from correspondence-specific
text structures to correspondence metadata. Subsequent to the workshop, the
problems, discussions, and recommendations were summarized as handbook articles
by the workshop participants. The articles underwent an internal review phase,
and are now published in successive stages on this website for the community to
comment and review. The articles now online and the ones coming soon are all in
version 1 and remain as such stable. The public review phase lasts until 30
April 2020. Then, all articles will be revised and adapted, and made available
in their final version here, as a version 2 of the handbook. </p>
<p n="10">This resulting handbook “Encoding Correspondence. A manual for encoding
letters and postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf” is meant as a guide for annotators
on characteristic and recurring problems of letter encoding in TEI, offering
solutions and recommendations based on the TEI Guidelines, as well as possible
extensions to the TEI. Next to these articles discussing the respective issues
in a more or less longer manner, we plan, as a long-term objective, to provide a
best practice guide of how to encode correspondence material for a quick and
short overview.</p>
<p n="11">The literature used as well as the bibliographic information for each
article itself are additionally stored in the <ref
target="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/"
>Zotero group "Encoding Correspondence"</ref> and embedded as <ref
target="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COinS">"COinS"</ref> in the HTML
version of this manual. Therefore, one can add the bibliographic data to a
literature management software with the appropriate browser extension (e.g. with
Zotero or the Citavi Picker).</p>
<p n="12">As this is a community effort, we kindly invite you to comment on or
review the articles, ask questions, give feedback, add examples of
correspondence or encoding, or whatever you find helpful for making this a
valuable resource for encoders of correspondence. This can be done with the
easy-to-use annotating tool <ref target="https://web.hypothes.is/"
>Hypothes.is</ref> or by using the e-mail button at the side of each
article.</p>
<p n="13">The complete handbook with all articles (but except the comments via
Hypothes.is) is availabe for download at GitHub: <ref
target="https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/encoding-correspondence"
>https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/encoding-correspondence</ref>.</p>
</div>
<div type="bibliography">
<head>Bibliography</head>
<listBibl>
<bibl
sameAs="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/9VYYBMPJ"
>Dumont, Stefan. 2016. ‟correspSearch – Connecting Scholarly Editions of
Letters.ˮ <hi rendition="#i">Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative</hi>
10. <ref target="http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1742"
>http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1742</ref>.</bibl>
<bibl
sameAs="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/ZJYUY9AL"
>Haaf, Susanne, Alexander Geyken, and Frank Wiegand. 2014/15. ‟The DTA 'Base
Format': A TEI Subset for the Compilation of a Large Reference Corpus of
Printed Text from Multiple Sources.ˮ <hi rendition="#i">Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative</hi> 8. <ref
target="http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1114"
>http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1114</ref>.</bibl>
<bibl
sameAs="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/3KQ6GAUR"
>Haaf, Susanne and Christian Thomas. 2017. ‟Enabling the Encoding of
Manuscripts within the DTABf: Extension and Modularization of the Format.ˮ
<hi rendition="#i">Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative</hi> 10
(2016–2019). <ref target="http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1650"
>http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1650</ref>.</bibl>
<bibl
sameAs="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/KEWAE85C"
>Stadler, Peter, Marcel Illetschko, and Sabine Seifert. 2016. ‟Towards a
Model for Encoding Correspondence in the TEI: Developing and Implementing
<correspDesc>.ˮ <hi rendition="#i">Journal of the Text Encoding
Initiative</hi> 9. <ref target="https://dx.doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1742"
>https://dx.doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1742</ref>.</bibl>
<bibl
sameAs="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2248469/encoding_correspondence/items/itemKey/TMLGNZ5L"
>TEI Consortium, ed. 2019. ‟Correspondence Description.ˮ In <hi
rendition="#i">TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange</hi>. Version 3.6.0, 63–65. <ref
target="https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html#HD44CD"
>https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html#HD44CD</ref>.</bibl>
</listBibl>
</div>
</body>
</text>
</TEI>