Editorial Introduction to Issue 7 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

This is one of the smallest issues of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, but its size belies its importance. This is the first issue of the Journal that had an open call for papers. Up to now, issues were either selected papers from the TEI conference (issues 1,2 4, and 6) or issues on a theme (issue 3: TEI and Linguistics and issue 5: TEI Infrastructures). This open call elicited articles that touch upon contemporary meta concerns within the community; evaluating and teach...

Pfannenschmidt and Clement's article also works on a meta level.It deals with an issue that is becoming more urgent as more digital humanists are employed in traditional academic departments and are allowed to have their digital scholarship count towards promotion and tenure.

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This article charts the issues involved in evaluating scholarship that has TEI-encoded text at its centre.It thoughtfully discusses the role (if any) that the TEI Consortium might play in this process.The article reflects the panoply of views of those who participated in the survey carried out by the authors as to what exactly is being evaluated when a work of digital scholarship based on a TEI-encoded text is being evaluated and who should do the reviewing.This article reminds us that evaluating digital scholarship should be a core scholarly concern, not simply for this community, but for the future of our disciplines as more and more scholarship utilizes the TEI as its primary knowledge representation system.
8 Desmond Schmidt's "Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition" revisits issues that were amongst those first articulated by the "Poughkeepsie Principles": 1 that of interoperability.Schmidt challenges some of the most fundamental design principles inherent in our methods of encoding, and hence creating digital scholarly editions.His propositions take into account the many new models of creating editions, from crowdsourcing to collaborative scholarship: something that the early designers of the TEI could barely imagine, let alone implement given the technologies at the time (and, indeed, throughout most of the TEI's existence).9 Schmidt's thesis is provocative, but this challenge to current practice marks a maturation of the community: one in which dominant theoretical stances are so widespread that their very dominance invites new perspectives.This is a healthy sign of a healthy intellectual community.cited (and cited in many languages), attesting to the international reach of the community and its official publication.There are over a thousand citations in Google Scholar: an amazing achievement for a journal so young.
15 But the journal would never have had such a smooth birth without the dedication of the first Managing Editor, Kevin S Hawkins, and Technical Editor, Markus Flatscher.Both were extremely generous with their time and talent, in which no matter was too big or too small to tackle, from line spacing in the final HTML output to designing the author's style guide in which issues such as to whether to capitalise to the g in the TEI Guidelines was discussed at length (we opted for Guidelines with a capital G).Without their help, enthusiasm, and dedication, the Journal would not have flourished as it does now.
16 When the Journal was established by the TEI Board, it was decided that the Technical Editor, the Managing Editor, and the Editor-in-Chief would have staggered terms, so that the entire team would not rotate off at the same time.After one year, when Markus stepped down, Ron Van den Branden took his place.Ron has been a pleasure to work with, quietly and efficiently dealing with any text that came his way, transforming each one so that the quality of the Journal's presentation is superb.