[9 Sep (Sun) Afternoon] Half-day Workshops
Introduction to TEI Encoding of Correspondence Meta Data
Workshop description
The objective of this training workshop is to convey the encoding of correspondence with the still rather new ‘correspDesc’ element. It will also present the derived Correspondence Meta Data Interchange Format (CMIF) for interconnecting letter collections. The aim of this workshop is twofold: 1) the dissemination of the encoding possibilities and 2) to get feedback that may help to improve the current Guidelines (with regard to correspDesc) and which may result in best practice models of letter encoding.
Details
With the release 2.8.0 of the TEI Guidelines in 2015, several new elements were introduced especially for the encoding of correspondence (letters, postcards, emails, etc.) (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html#HD44CD). The workshop will discuss those elements and how they can be applied to the participants' own correspondence collections. The focus will thus be on the meta data of correspondence material, separating the communicative, the material and the textual aspects which are to be encoded within ‘correspDesc’, ‘sourceDesc’ and ‘profileDesc’, respectively.
Additionally, the Correspondence Meta Data Interchange Format (CMIF) will be presented (https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF). The CMIF is a constrained TEI customization provided by the Correspondence SIG for facilitating interchange of correspondence meta data which builds on authority controlled IDs (e.g. VIAF and GeoNames) for identifying entities, and the W3C format for dates. This enables e. g. the web service “correspSearch” (http://correspsearch.net/) to aggregate index listings of various letter collections and to enable searching across those collections. This web service also allows to record correspondence meta data in a CMIF file via the “CMIF creator” (https://correspsearch.net/creator/).
Participants are welcome to bring correspondence materials they might be aware of or working on and that can serve as a basis for discussion and hands-on encoding phases during the workshop. With these examples, we want to get feedback that may help improve the current TEI Guidelines with regard to the encoding of correspondence and that may result in more enhanced encoding examples (https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/correspDesc) and best practice models.