[Closing remarks by John Unsworth]
[As delivered Pisa, Nov 17 2001]

Thanks: {antonio, sarah; tei-trans group; tone merete; editors; lou for
organizing the program, our speakers, and all the rest of you for coming
here.

Welcome: to our new board members (Peter Robinson, Harold Short) and to
our new council members (Matthew Driscoll, Tomaz Erjavec, Merrilee Proffitt,
Laurent Romary, Perry Willet, Christian Wittern)

Who will the consortium represent? A more general user?  Linguists?  Literary
scholars?  Some specific kind of scholarly user?  Libraries?  Publisher?

Who will be our members?  The current members will help to answer these
questions by recruiting, and I would like to encourage you to help us
recruit with  special attention to diversity.  We are now predominantly
american and academic, in terms of our institutional membership: our
academic members are largely libraries: we need more scholarly societies
and more research groups.  We also need more non-academic members: in
particular more publishers and more software developers. As we've already
discussed, we need to make participation easier for institutions from areas
outside North America and Europe.

In our elected representatives, we are predominantly white and male.  Out of
two editors, nine board members, and six council members, we have two women,
one on the board, and one on the council.  All of our board, council, and
editors are white.  We do need to select for expertise, but we need to make
sure we are looking for that expertise wherever it occurs, not just where
we have already found it.  We will need to make a similar, conscious effort
to be expansive and inclusive with respect to disciplines, language groups,
and perspectives on text.

As we go out to recruit new members and enlarge the community, we also
need to make a conscious effort to articulate the value of the TEI, and
not simply to assume it is obvious.  For one part of the community,
libraries, the value of TEI has to do with preservation--yesterday's
information tomorrow.  For libraries and for another part of the community,
publishers, the value of TEI may be reusability--build once, use many.
For a scholarly user, the value may be that the TEI's status as knowledge
representation: I'd like to say a word more on this.

KR is of current interest to me, and to the MA in Digital Humanities at
Virginia, and it is so, because its combination of logic, ontology, and
computation defines very well what we do when we do humanities computing:
viewed as a knowledge representation, the TEI guidelines and DTD are one
of the largest, most complex ontologies of textuality ever developed in
the broad community of literary and linguistic computing. In fact, that's
why I got involved with trying to set up a consortium to sustain and
develop it.  If we recognize it as an ontology of text, then however broad
it is, or becomes, it will always represent certain ontological
commitments with respect to the nature of text--and the fact that it makes
those commitments, and makes them publicly, and makes them consistently,
makes it extremely useful as a way of understanding what we do and don't
think about text, either by seeing them expressed in TEI, or by contrast to
TEI.  Either is useful, and we need all kinds of perspectives in the TEI
community, including, and perhaps especially, those who feel they have
problems the TEI is poorly suited to addressing--especially as we approach P5,
as has been said, an opportunity to think TEI through from the ground up.

We've spent the last two, almost three years setting up the legal, financial,
and electoral aspects of the Consortium.  Now it is time to begin the technical
work.  We've heard a lot about some highly specialized issues that the TEI
can, and should, address going forward--items for workgroup recommendations
and council approval.  Some of these are quite basic to how the TEI should
work in the future, and how it is perceived by the world.  Beyond the
technical work, and the community-building work, we also have marketing work
to do.  I hope that the volume I've proposed to the MLA, on electronic textual
editing, will help to demonstrate the usefulness of the TEI to one of its
core communities.  There are others, and I hope you will help us find ways
to reach them, to show them how the TEI may be of use to them, and--if we
succeed in convincing them to experiment with TEI--to hear from them the
constraints or shortcomings they find in TEI.  And finally, one of our major
tasks in the coming year will be to develop member services, including
training and certification, and we will look to you to help us design those
services, as you will be either providing them, or enjoying them, or both.

I look forward to working with you on all of these things, and I especially
look forward to expanding the TEI community.

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