[Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time?

[Simpson, Rita]

Interesting question...

> There are two issues here:
> 1. Ignorance and confusion. Most people have only a vague 
> idea what TEI
> is or does or what it is good for. There would need to be a effort to
> (re-) educate the potential users of TEI. Does TEI do something
> different from XML? Absurd question I know but that is the kind of
> confusion which I suspect exists.
> 
> 2. Complexity. When it was introduced many people reacted 
> against it as
> too complex. Now they have all adopted xml, rdf etc. which 
> are much more
> complicated to use. So potential users' perception would now 
> be ripe for
> a re-presentation of TEI. 
> 

Related to both of these issues is that of the documentation available
to educate people & help potential users understand what TEI is, does,
& is good for. A research assistant & I have recently been poring over a

couple chapters of the TEI guidelines, looking for guidelines & relevant
examples to add some markup to our already (mostly) TEI-conformant
corpus
markup scheme. Although the documentation is extensive, it is inadequate

in many ways, missing examples, not very good at giving a larger picture
to people who aren't sure if they need/want the TEI at all or who just
need
some pointers to a few relevant sections. If the only people who can
read the documentation and make use of it are information/library
science
people who are specifically trained in that area, then it's no wonder 
linguists & others who are in the business of building corpora are not 
using it or promoting it. 

Rita Simpson

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Project Director, Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)
English Language Institute
University of Michigan
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