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Editorial Introduction to Issue 10 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

Marjorie Burghart and Emmanuelle Morlock

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1The selection of papers presented in this issue reflects the content of the 2015 TEI conference, which was hosted in Lyon, France. We want to dedicate this special issue to the many people who contributed to the success of this conference, bringing together almost two hundred people from all continents for a full week, combining two days of workshops with three days of conference. We hope that the participants brought home new ideas and knowledge as well as great memories, and that the event did justice to our city and its long-standing involvement in the TEI and Digital Humanities.

2A couple of years after the conference itself, as we write those introductory lines, its theme still resonates. The motto “Connect, Animate, Innovate” expresses how the power of the TEI is realized in interactions. Those interactions are at play between texts and programs, of course, which are connected thanks to this standard. They also occur between practices and between individual members of the community: nourished by conferences, workshops, the network of TEI scholars is fundamentally a forum that encourages exchanges of ideas, mutual support and assistance, and the ground for fruitful cooperation from which everyone benefits.

3In 2015, nearly fifty speakers of the TEI Conference raised to the challenge of this theme, offering a wide array of posters and papers. The papers were arranged in no less than sixteen sessions, to which we must add the traditional poster session and slam. Those sessions focused on three types of issues.

4First, five sessions were chiefly preoccupied with the practical aspects of working with the TEI, especially its software environment, exploring respectively “Shared platforms for the TEI Community,” “Tooling,” “Publishing,” “Workflows,” and “Interoperability” and the TEI. This strand is represented in this edited volume by two articles. “The TEI Critical Apparatus Toolbox: Empowering Textual Scholars through Display, Control, and Comparison Features” by Marjorie Burghart introduces a new specialized platform designed to meet the needs of scholars preparing scholarly digital editions, allowing them to take immediate benefit from their encoding by automatically checking their TEI file for inconsistencies, for instance, or even by assisting them in the automatic creation of a printable LaTeX / PDF version of their edition. “Migrate, Publish, Repeat: TEI Journals in the Open Journal Systems Platform” by Nicholas Homenda and Shayna Pekala explores the challenges posed by the publication of TEI journals, and more precisely the various migrations of TEI journals at the Indiana University (IU) Libraries. “Why TEI Stand-off Markup Authoring Needs Simplification” by Raffaele Viglianti explores the importance and practical challenges of stand-off markup. Drawing from the experience of two projects, Freischütz Digital and the Shelley-Godwin Archive, it introduces the coreBuilder, a new open source visual authoring environment for stand-off markup.

5Another set of sessions focused on the application of the TEI to various specialized areas of scholarship. Manuscript studies and digital scholarly editions had a place of choice, with sessions on “codicology,” “manuscript encoding,” or “textual variants.” Other sessions explored “Encoding orality and performance,” “Encoding historical data,” “Correspondence” or even “TEI across corpora, languages and genres: Towards a standard for the representation of social media and computer-mediated communication.” This strand is represented by three articles in this volume. “correspSearch – Connecting Scholarly Editions of Letters” by Stefan Dumont illustrates both community standard endeavors and innovation. Focused on how a webservice can be used to put inter-relations between different editions of the same correspondence into practice, it also illustrates how this theme of connection refers also to connection between social practices (a standardized way of describing a letter with metadata in the <teiHeader> designed in the context of a TEI SIG) and its exploitation by a tool in the form of an Application Programming Interface (API). But this article also puts this association of standard and tool in perspective, showing how it can provide the basis for an innovative exploitation using other technologies or software (aggregated searches, network visualizations, etc.) – a connection of technologies that opens the path to innovation. “Enabling the Encoding of Manuscripts within the DTABf: Extension and Modularization of the Format” by Susanne Haaf and Christian Thomas introduces us to the current work on the Deutsches Textarchiv “Base format” (DTABf), to create a TEI subset designed for the encoding of manuscripts (DTABf-M). This extension will allow the encoding of manuscript-specific features in the Deutsches Textarchiv, like additions and deletions, substitutions, changes of hand or different types of notes. It is a very clear description (and rare example) of a chaining of ODDs, confirming that chaining ODDs is both achievable and efficient. In “Deep Encoding of Etymological Information in TEI,” Jack Bowers and Laurent Romary set forward comprehensive modeling principles for etymological data in TEI-encoded dictionaries, with the aim of offering a framework valid for legacy dictionaries converted from print as well as born-digital ones.

6Finally, a last group of sessions were chiefly concerned with more abstract questions – one of them was even named “Abstracting the TEI”! Others explored “Interchange” and “Hermeneutics,” as well as the more social issue of “Presentation and engagement with the TEI.” This strand is represented here by the article “It will discourse most eloquent music: Sonifying Variants of Hamlet” by Iain Emsley and David De Roure. This article shows that innovation can also be expressed in the processing and visualization of the encoding to explore the texts. Sonification is the sound counterpart to visualization: it uses sound to describe and represent data structures or relationships in an encoded text – literally making us up to our ears in TEI!

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Marjorie Burghart and Emmanuelle Morlock, “Editorial Introduction to Issue 10 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative”Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 10 | December 2016 - July 2019, Online since 02 July 2019, connection on 23 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/2055; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.2055

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The text only may be used under licence For this publication a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license has been granted by the author(s) who retain full copyright. . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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