Hi all,
That mark up would go obsolete as facsimile become readily available seems to me a preposterous conclusion. As mark up is in use as a means of data exchange in many more domains than digital editing alone, it is in no way possible to call it obsolete. Moreover, facsimile of manuscript material can hardly be called machine readable. As long as OCR is not able to 'understand' handwriting, transcription and mark up will proof its uses for the humanities domain.
However, as good digital humanities scholars we should always question our mark up practice as progression in information technology is made. Because Peter is my colleague I know he favors handcrafted TEI mark up as a means of simultaneously structuring ones thoughts about a text as well as the text itself. This might be. But arguably tagging text according to TEI guidelines (or any other standard for that matter) is a laborious and potentially frustrating task, especially when you're a newby on the job. From experience I can tell that TEI is hardly the way to win over 'digital dummies' to the digital humanities side of the broader argument.
I do think that numerable emerging projects (like Kevin Kiernan's 'Edition Production Tool' (EPT) and Sebastian Rahtz' Open Office TEI filter) are doing an increasingly good job at both abstracting away form the TEI-particulars and hiding the major amount of time and work involved in applying XML by hand. Which is what good software tools should be all about: abstracting from technical particulars and supporting any process in such a way the it becomes faster, more efficient and easier to use. Thus providing the tools that answer to the scholars intuition when handling and structuring text, seems a good way forward to me. That mark up recedes into the background due to such abstracting developments is a good thing. Just like you don't need to know the XML particulars of an OTD-XML file to write a perfectly comprehensible letter in Open Office, you shouldn't need to know the TEI-XML particulars when structuring a text for literary research purposes. The research value is in the act of structuring, not in the particular tagset used and not even in the mark up model applied.
So I'd say there's indeed a paradox. Bolton is right in that TEI should become obsolete in the foreground of digital scholarly edition tools. But as TEI/XML recedes from the editing screen to the file, it will of course in no way become obsolete as a perfectly good means of storing edition material. But sadly, Bolton (as qouted by Dan at least) does not appear to have come to this kind of perception. She just seems to forward XML to oblivion because she now can see a scanned original.
Yours sincerely, Joris