Hi all,
My first thought on this issue is that it looks as a paradox to me to judge TEI as obsolete. How can you call an initiative that changes all the time according to scholars' needs and contributions obsolete? As we know TEI is an effort to produce guidelines, it isn't a static set of rules to follow. Hopefully it shouldn't have time to become obsolete by aiming to evolve all the time. It could be claimed that this is theory, just ideological statements that are in fact not applied in practice. However, and this is my second point, to allow TEI to grow and face new challenges humanists' contribution is needed. I don't need to stress this point since others in this list did it already better than I could.
The second part of Dan's question is more complex and, I think, involves the broader issue of Humanities Computing as a discipline that aims to incorporate either expertise proper to medieval studies - to stay in the field - and expertise proper to technical skills. Even when all the benefits of XML encoding are full understood and valued, for a medievalist it can be rather demanding and frustrating to acquire practical knowledge of mark-up or of any other "technicality" from scratch. It is rare to find the combination of technical skills and humanities expertise in a single scholar. Indeed, digital humanities disciplines require a collaborative work where different expertise meet and discuss, reaching fruitful compromises. This doesn't mean at all that computer engineers to talk to are the solutions, but rather than community based resources (as TEI and Digital Medievalist are together with Humanist and new born soon...) and humanities computing specialists that filter and produce a set of best practices is a step towards the most fruitful direction.
Who is a humanist computing specialist? Someone who has already adapted the available technology (TEI-XML/database based etc.) or, in some cases, who has created technological solutions for other humanities computing projects with similar problematic needs.
When tools become more complex - and we want them to become more complex to fulfill our demands -, the research process becomes more complex as well, enlarging itself, facilitating shared practices, more democratic and therefore more critical.
Arianna Ciula
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Daniel Paul O'Donnell Sent: 21 June 2005 20:16 To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subject: [dm-l] Are markup languages obsolete?
Hi all, As some of you know, I write a column on electonica medievalia for Heroic Age, a superb online journal in its 8th year. My next column is due soon, and while I was originally planning to write on TEI P5, something that came up on Medtext has sat in my head for the last several weeks: it was an email from Judith Bolton Halloway (I think it was) that described markup languages and protocols like the TEI as obsolete in the face of high quality manuscript facsimiles (I'm paraphrasing and so might not have it exactly right). What I'm wondering is not so much whether markup languages are obsolete (that's demonstrably not true in a technical sense), but whether there is an easy argument that they are worth it for a low tech humanities oriented person to learn. I'm thinking here of the issues raised in Peter Robinson's article in the premier issue of DM, various talks I've given or heard at conferences. So here's a question: when is it worth it to devote time to learning a complex language like TEI--or any other standards based structural language or computer skill (and when is it not)? What should one expect to get out of going to the trouble of learning them? And what do you lose by (or simply what is the cost of) doing so? I suppose this might be a question for Humanist, but I thought I'd try it out here given the medieval focus of HA. I'm not (necessarily) looking for answers to my topic for my column, but I'm interested in mulling the question over with others before I set cursor to screen. -dan