LingSIG Hits the Lucky 7: A view at the past and a vision of the future (paper)
Piotr Banski* Piotr Bański is a researcher at the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. He is a founder and co-convener of the “TEI for Linguists” SIG (LingSIG) and a former member of the TEI Technical Council. Piotr currently serves as Chair of the CLARIN Standards Committee, an expert in the German mirror of ISO TC37 SC4 “Language Resource Management,” and a project leader within its Working Group 6 “Linguistic Annotation.” He is also a member of the expert group “Textual processing and edition” in the PARTHENOS project. and Andreas Witt* Andreas Witt is Professor of Digital Humanities and Linguistic Processing of Information at University of Cologne and director of the Research Infrastructure Division at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim. Since 2014, Andreas has held an honorary appointment at the Institute for Computational Linguistics at Heidelberg University and for the term 2016-2018 he was selected as a research fellow at the iSchool of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Andreas co-chairs the TEI-SIG “TEI for Linguists” and serves as the convener of the ISO working group “Linguistic Annotation” (ISO TC37 SC4 WG6).
1In this presentation, we are going to sum up the past 7 years of the activity of the Special Interest Group “TEI for Linguists” (known as the LingSIG), critically assess its starting goals and present the current endeavours.
2The mission of the LingSIG is to promote the use of TEI-based markup schemes for the encoding of language resources as well as to enhance the current repertoire of the TEI Guidelines to reflect the needs of the linguistic and language-resource communities.
3The first LingSIG meeting took place at the TEI-MM in Zadar, in 2010. Since then, the SIG has produced a Zotero bibliography, a volume of articles in a special issue of jTEI (Issue 3 on “TEI and Linguistics”), and has been active in organizing parts of the annual TEI Members’ Meetings (full-fledged workshops, mini-workshops, discussion panels) as well as additional activities on various occasions. The members of the SIG have been actively involved in improving and extending the Guidelines, including establishing the
<standOff> element and introducing means to bind the content of representations to external data category repositories.
4Other activities include promoting the cooperation with Research Infrastructure projects like DARIAH and CLARIN, integrating the TEI into the work of ISO TC37 SC4 “Language resource management,” and coordinating efforts with the Computer-Mediated Communication SIG.
5With the relatively recent move of the LingSIG repository from Sourceforge to Github, a new promise has opened for the group, regarding both the social aspects and the possibilities to integrate the work results into the TEI Guidelines. The current projects that the LingSIG is involved in include the fleshing out of the content of the <standOff> element, creating a proposal for introducing linguistic attributes for lightweight annotation of language corpora, and defining the baseline proposals for digitizing lexica (in the DARIAH/PARTHENOS/ENeL initiative “TEI Lex0”).