RE: [Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time?

From: Mcenery, Tony (eiaamme@exchange.lancs.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 16:54:31 MET DST

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    Dear Rita,

    Yes, I have some sympathy with the point you make. The thing that has attracted me to the TEI in the past, though, is once the effort is made to get to grips with it (and it is daunting) there is usually a well thought through solution contained in it for almost any problem situation you come across in encoding a corpus! With that said, it is a clear theme of the posts so far that there is, at the very least, an advocacy issue related to the TEI in corpus linguistics, which is interesting.

    Best,

    T

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Simpson, Rita [mailto:ritacsim@umich.edu]
    Sent: 26 June 2003 14:09
    To: Christopher Brewster; corpora@uib.no
    Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time?

    Interesting question...

    > There are two issues here:
    > 1. Ignorance and confusion. Most people have only a vague
    > idea what TEI
    > is or does or what it is good for. There would need to be a effort to
    > (re-) educate the potential users of TEI. Does TEI do something
    > different from XML? Absurd question I know but that is the kind of
    > confusion which I suspect exists.
    >
    > 2. Complexity. When it was introduced many people reacted
    > against it as
    > too complex. Now they have all adopted xml, rdf etc. which
    > are much more
    > complicated to use. So potential users' perception would now
    > be ripe for
    > a re-presentation of TEI.
    >

    Related to both of these issues is that of the documentation available
    to educate people & help potential users understand what TEI is, does,
    & is good for. A research assistant & I have recently been poring over a

    couple chapters of the TEI guidelines, looking for guidelines & relevant
    examples to add some markup to our already (mostly) TEI-conformant
    corpus
    markup scheme. Although the documentation is extensive, it is inadequate

    in many ways, missing examples, not very good at giving a larger picture
    to people who aren't sure if they need/want the TEI at all or who just
    need
    some pointers to a few relevant sections. If the only people who can
    read the documentation and make use of it are information/library
    science
    people who are specifically trained in that area, then it's no wonder
    linguists & others who are in the business of building corpora are not
    using it or promoting it.

    Rita Simpson

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    -
    Project Director, Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)
    English Language Institute
    University of Michigan
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