Summary of TEI Training SIG Meeting

The group began by reviewing what had been decided last year in Nancy in terms of posting resources online that would help individuals and projects to learn about the TEI, including individual project practice, opportunities for training, examples of texts, etc. See last year’s report here.

Susan Schreibman said that Adriaan van der Weel (who is compiling a bibliography of published texts relating to the TEI) had sent an email to the TEI list and got very few responses. Julia Flanders agreed that there may be few published texts. Susan mentioned that once two books which are currently in production are published, A Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities and Electronic Textual Editing, there would be significantly more items to add to the bibliography. It was also mentioned that Peter Robinson is thinking of revising his Digitization of Primary Textual Sources, published by OUP (1993). Additionally, the April 2004 volume of Literary and Linguistic Computing (vol. 19 no.1) and the 10th Year Anniversary issue of P3 published in Computers and the Humanities (vol. 33 no. 1-2) are valuable resources.Susan showed those present the page she compiled on TEI Training. Matthew Driscoll said he must have missed the email Susan posted asking for links — he said he would send her some information on courses he has given to be added to the page. Alan Morrison said that Oxford has done quite a bit of training and he would like to see internal training documentation produced for training the trainers. People felt that it was most useful to link to courses on the TEI site that are repeated, and to courses which have resources attached to them.There was a general discussion of Training Events. Alan Morrison suggested that the TEI might have a course they give regularly. Julia brought up there had been a number of courses given recently through individual institutions. She mentioned courses at Weaton and Berkeley, as well as the Humanities Computing Summer Institute in Victoria organized by Ray Siemens (an annual event). Julia pointed out that she felt that training events targeted at a specific community or arising out of a particular opportunity seem to do very well.

Matthew raised the idea of swat team for TEI training. There was a general discussion about this, and the group came back to the idea that a page would be compiled for the TEI site which lists trainers by region, specialty, etc.

Julia also raised the idea that some individuals associated with the TEI might be willing to be grant consultants for projects submitting funding proposals. This list might be compiled like the Trainers list: by country, area of expertise, center attached to, etc. Their work would be pro bono. Julia agreed to put this list together.

Julia suggested that we might want to consider renaming the SIG as its brief is much broader. She suggested TEI Education, which the group unanimously agreed with.

Chris Rutolo agreed that she would make the commitment this year to put together the page on University courses. The group knew of several people who taught TEI-based courses at the University level: Tone Merete Bruvik, Elena Pierazzo, Susan Schreibman, Edward Vanhoutte, John Walsh.

Alan brought up that the TEI website needs to be better organized. Julia said that this was underway and that the pages we are producing could be used for the new site.

Dolores Iorizzo suggested that dissemination which was a component of most grants, could include the project giving a workshop, which would have the benefit of training others in the same methodology.

Jamie Spriggs and Scott Hamlin from Wheaton College (who could not attend the SIG meeting) agreed that they would compile a Documentation page. It was decided to create a page which links to project specific documentation rather than try to collect a samples page (as was agreed last year). Individual projects’ documentation would probably include samples, and there were other SIGS which would find the documentation useful.

Julia suggested that we might organize a ‘challenge’ on the TEI List for samples; the samples would be sent in by individuals which could be harvested onto a page. She added that this activity might not be part of this SIG’s work.

Present:

• Tone Merete Bruvik, University of Bergen
• Matthew Driscoll, University of Copenhagen
• Julia Flanders, Brown University
• Dolores Iorizzo, Imperial College London
• Alan Morrison, Oxford University
• Christian-Emil Ore, University of Oslo
• Chris Ruotolo, University of Virginia
• Susan Schreibman, University of Maryland