Additional funding is being sought from industry and private foundations. Funding for the work plan has since been provided by substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the European Economic Community.
Compatibility with existing schemes would be sought where possible, and in particular, ISO standard 8879, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), would provide the basic syntax for the guidelines if feasible.Īfter the Vassar meeting, ACH joined with the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) as co-sponsors of the project and defined a four-year work plan to achieve the project's goals. The guidelines would specify both what features should be encoded (at a minimum) and how they should be encoded, as well as suggest ways to describe the resulting encoding scheme and its relationship with pre-existing schemes. Participants at an ACH planning conference in November 1987 at Vassar College agreed that it was necessary and feasible to define guidelines for both the interchange of existing encoded texts and the creation of newly encoded texts. The Initiative began in the fall of 1987 at the instigation of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), which was concerned about the variety of formats and the deficiencies of encoding schemes used in the preparation of computer readable texts for scholarly analysis. The purpose of the meeting was to seek the views of the newly constituted Advisory Board concerning the structure and proposed strategy of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), to explain its relevance to the interests of these groups, and to encourage active participation in the work of the Initiative by the groups' members.
These groups represented the spectrum of academic disciplines from computer science to lexicography to literary studies as well as professional librarians and publishers. Hosted by the University of Illinois, Chicago, the first meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative's Advisory Board brought together seventeen representatives from key professional and learned societies. Brown in her capacity as the AHA's appointee on the Advisory Board of the Text Encoding Initiative.
Introduction The past few years have seen a burst of activity in the development of statistical methods which, applied to massive text data, have in turn enabled the.Editor's Note: The following report was submitted by Elizabeth A. Encoding, markup, large text resources, corpora, SGML. In January 1994, the TEI issued its Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of Machine-Readable Texts, which provide standardized encoding conventions for a large range of text types and features relevant for a broad range of applications. The need for standardized encoding practices has become inxreasingly critical as the need to use and, most importantly, reuse vast amounts of electronic text has dramatically increased for both research and industry, in particular for natural language processing.
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an international project established in 1988 to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for research, and to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries more generally.