Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0620. Friday, 15 July 1994.
From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 15 Jul 1994 12:23:23 CDT
Subject: TEI Guidelines
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
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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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., 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).
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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
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.:
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
(This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or by
fax: +81 (43) 256-7032.