TEI Manuscripts Special Interest Group

The goal of the TEI Special Interest Group on Manuscripts is to bring together users of the TEI who wish to improve the encoding strategies for marking up transcriptions and editions of manuscript materials.

This SIG explores a range of issues common to editing manuscripts, including:

how to handle time based encoding

how to record place based encoding

how to encode fragments

how to record codicology (the substance of the medium, ink stints, etc); Robinson noted that the TEI already has mechanisms to record this, but it needs to be better documented

issues of substitutions

issues of variation

to clarify the role of the critical apparatus tag set in manuscript transcription

The group operates by means a mailing list and also has an area on the TEI wiki.

NEW: Manuscripts SIG Web Space, including Documents and Genetic Criticism TEI Style.

The SIG is convened by Dot Porter and Gerrit Brüning. The SIG runs a mailing list, which you can join by visiting http://listserv.brown.edu/tei-ms-sig.html

Recent Activities

The Manuscript SIG sponsored the following activities during the 2009 TEI Conference and Members' Meeting in Ann Arbor:

a panel "New Tools and Perspectives for Manuscript Editing", organised by Amanda Gailey, with papers delivered by Elena Pierazzo, Jindrich Marek, and Tanya Clement
a panel "Encoding Genetic Editions", organised by the SIG task force, with presentations by Fotis Jannidis, Elena Pierazzo, Lou Burnard, and Malte Rehbein
other papers and posters that cover manuscript related topics. e.g. the Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota; Tone Merete Bruvik, and Odd Einar Haugen), The St. Patrick's Confessio Hypertext Stack (Franz Fischer), Digital Scholarly Editions of Letters and Correspondence (Bert van Raemdonck), Wittgenstein's Nachlass in P5 (Tone Merete Bruvik, Alois Pichler, and Vermund Olstad), the new TEI-EJ journal, and a rountable discussion on "Trends to Watch in the TEI Community"

Abstracts of the presentations can be found here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/spo/teimeeting09/program.html .

Furthermore, the annual SIG Business Meeting was held with more than a dozen participants. Brief minutes can be found here, while more detailed minutes can be found on the wiki: http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIGMS_Minutes_20091114 .