Category: News

The Text Encoding Initiative Special Interest Group in Music is pleased to announce the results of a TEI-funded project to bring music encoding into TEI documents.

Music, like many other art forms, is often mentioned, discussed and described in writings of various kinds. This applies to both historical and contemporary documents, even though the way of notating music has changed considerably in western history. In most cases, music notation enters the text flow in a way similar to figures, images or graphs. On other occasions, elements of music notation are treated as characters in running text.

The TEI with Music Notation customization introduces a way of signalling the presence of music notation in text, but defers to other representations to describe the music notation itself, which is not covered by TEI guidelines. In fact, several commercial, academic and standard bodies have developed digital representations of music notation and, given the topic’s complexity, these representations often focus on different aspects and adopt different methodologies. Therefore, the customization defines a container element to encode the occurrence of music notation and allows linking to the data format preferred by the encoder. This element is called notatedMusic, which has been proposed to enter the TEI specifications and TEI’s namespace in a feature request available here for further discussion.

The customization also allows the use of elements from the Music Encoding Iniative (MEI) format that is modelled on the TEI, aims to be independent from rendering software and provides encoding methods for different research approaches in musicology. MEI provides a vocabulary for the representation of Common Western Music Notation, mensural and neume notation and aims to offer extension mechanisms to include other notation systems and non-standard notational components. Moreover, it accommodates a number of modules to express declarative knowledge about the music being encoded, such as analysis, critical commentary,ambiguity, variants, etc. The MEI format was released in its first stable version in summer 2010.

We would like to invite those of you who are interested in the encoding of texts which contain music notation to access the documentation, the ODD and the schema on the SIG’s webspace:

http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Music/twm/index.html

We consider this output as a beta release and we are very interested in collecting comments, feedback and discussing possible use scenarios. Please join our mailing list if you would like to discuss any aspect of this customization.

With kind regards,
Raffaele Viglianti

—
Raffaele Viglianti
PhD Candidate and PGRA
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King’s College London

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that the 2011 TEI Conference and Members Meeting will be hosted by the University of Würzburg and its Centre for Digital Editing in cooperation with the German Archive of Literature / Museum of Modern Literature Marbach.

The proposed conference dates are 10-16 October 2011.

The conference programme committee and local organisation will be led by Laurent Romary for the TEI and Fotis Jannidis, Roland Kamzelak (German Archive of Literature Marbach), Malte Rehbein (manager), and Werner Wegstein for the local organisation.

The specific wording of the theme of the conference is to be determined by the committee and will appear in the call for papers. But it should include an emphasis on digital editing in keeping with the emphasis of the Centre at the University. As always papers on all aspects of markup will be considered.

As part of the planning for the conference, the local organisers intend to offer delegates an excursion to Marbach to visit the German Archive of Literature, the Schiller Museum (Marbach is the birthplace of Friedrich Schiller), and the Museum of Modern Literature. Special rates have already been negotiated with local hotels.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

From: Ron Van den Branden <ron.vandenbranden@KANTL.BE>
To: TEI-L@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: [TEI-L] TEI-L mirrors: polished and shining

Hi all,

Thanks to the patient help of Jason Hunter (MarkMail) and Hugo Teixeira (Nabble), the TEI-L archive is
now mirrored properly on:

-MarkMail: <http://markmail.org/list/edu.brown.listserv.tei-l>
-Nabble: <http://tei-l.970651.n3.nabble.com/>

Both contain the full TEI-L archive and are actively accumulating all new messages that are being posted. It has taken some extra spare time to fix (or at least improve on) the character encoding issues of my previous effort, but the result should look much better now. Thanks for the hints on character encoding on this list. For the record: I have taken the manual route Martin suggested, using the excellent Notepad++ editor to convert all 15K+ messages to UTF-8 and spot encoding difficulties. It won’t be perfect, but hopefully good enough to be of use.

Kind regards,

Ron

At the 2010 Members Meeting in Croatia, the membership voted in favour of the Board’s proposal for changes to the Bylaws. Amongst some housecleaning, the proposals included major changes in the structure and voting membership of the Board and the relationship of “Host” Institutions to the Consortium.

The vote was unanimous amongst the ballots cast. However, the total number of ballots fell just short of the required number for quorum. In its subsequent meeting, the Board took the membership vote as a strong recommendation and used its power to amend most sections of the Bylaws (except those pertaining to the size of the Board) to effect the proposed changes. In addition to these changes, the Board also made a number of other changes in terminology, for example, renaming the “Host institutions” to “Partner institutions” to better reflect their new role.

Because of the complexity of the changes, the Board’s initial approval was in principle, reserving final pending the drafting of specific language and check on consistency. This process was completed in January 2011 and approved by the Board on Friday, January 14, 2011.

The new Bylaws are now in effect and available on the Consortium’s website: http://www.tei-c.org/About/bylaws.xml. Special elections required for the transition to the new Board structure should be announced soon.

Dec. 8, 2010 – Joining the ranks of academics working to implement a sustainable model of scholarly communications in the Internet Age, the American Literatures Initiative announced today that it has adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as the XML standard for its future publications.

“TEI is perfectly suited to handle the types of books our member presses publish,” said Penny Kaiserlian, director of the University of Virginia Press and current chair of the five-member ALI partnership. “Adopting TEI as our standard will advance our mission to develop a cost-effective workflow to make production of academic monographs economically sustainable and available in a variety of print and digital formats.”

The American Literatures Initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is in the third year of a five-year program designed to revive the publication of high-quality monographs by first-time academic
authors in a discipline where getting published is becoming increasingly difficult. In addition to Virginia, ALI members include the Fordham University Press, New York University Press, Rutgers University Press,
and Temple University Press.

The TEI is an international consortium that governs the TEI Guidelines, a standard for encoding texts in an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format. The TEI Guidelines are one of several such text coding schemes necessary for the successful creation of easily repurposable digital editions of scholarly works. Originally developed for use with academic texts, the TEI Guidelines include bibliographic enhancements useful to scholars, such as the ability to retain page references in reflowed documents.

The TEI Consortium is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.), the European Union, the Canadian Social Research Council, and others. The TEI Guidelines have been widely used by
libraries and scholars engaged in online research programs such as Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda digital collections. The Scholarly Publishing Special Interest Group, which grew out of a need in the university press community, is focused on the use of TEI in original scholarly publication.

The American Literatures Initiative is an innovative, entrepreneurial, cooperative effort to expand the number of books published in literary studies and increase audience reach by using common resources available to the five Presses through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program provides a shared, centralized editorial office managing the production of the books and ensuring high-quality
copyediting and design and a collaborative, high-profile, and aggressive marketing program. For more information on The American Literatures Initiative, please visit: http://www.americanliteratures.org

For more information, contact:
Lisa Fortunato
Publicity Manager
Rutgers University Press
lisafort@rutgers.edu
732-445-7762 x 626

Dear all,

The minutes from the meeting in the Ontologies SIG during the TEI 
annual meeting is now out: http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Ontologies/meetings/m20101112.html
Corrections may be made until December 10, then the minutes will be 
stable.

The new web space of the SIG is in use now, with most of the material 
updated: http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Ontologies/

Kind regards,

Øyvind Eide

Dear all,

It is already more than two weeks ago that the MS SIG had their annual
meeting during the TEI conference in Zadar. We had a lively discussion
with about 25 participants expressing their interest in manuscript
related encoding. The results in brief:

1. Review of the SIG’s work of the past year, in particular the new
module on genetic encoding
2. Work plan for 2011
a) Revision of Critical Apparatus
b) Extension of msDesc toward tboDesc
c) MSS ODD
d) Community Building / PR
3. Evaluation and discussion of the SIG’s survey on needs and
requirements of the community

You can find the minutes in our wiki:
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIGMS_Minutes_20101112

Please join the ongoing discussions!
All the best,
Malte

—
Dr. Malte Rehbein