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%               Stig Johansson <h_johansson%use.uio.uninett@NORUNIX>
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% From:         Stig Johansson <h_johansson%use.uio.uninett@NORUNIX>
% To:           "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <U35395@UICVM>
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\documentstyle[12pt]{article}
\title{TEI TR M 1 \\
Minutes \\ of the \\ First Meeting of the Text Representation
Committee \\of the \\Text Encoding Initiative \\ Held at the
University of Toronto, 6 June 1989}
\date{16 June 1989}
\author{Lou Burnard}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{quote}
{\it Present: } Stig Johansson (SJ), chair; Robert Amsler (RA)*
\footnote{Stars indicate observers}; Lou Burnard (LB);
Roberto Cencioni (RC); David Chesnutt (DC); Steven DeRose (SDR);
David Durand (DD)*; Susan Hockey (SH); Francisco Marcos-Marin (FMM)*; Elli
Mylonas (EM); Wilhem Ott (WO); Allen Renear (AR)*; Manfred Thaller
(MT); Antonio Zampolli (AZ)* ({\it in part}).
\end{quote}
 
\section{Introductory Discussion}
SJ welcomed the members of the committee. He was arranging individual
meetings with each of the officially appointed working members present. Other
interested parties were welcome to participate in the meeting,
though they might not vote and could not be funded by the TEI.
The committee should aim to produce a first draft of its
recommendations by September 1989, with an agreed version by
February 1990. Committee members should check that their
connexion to BITNET was functioning: minutes and other papers
would be primarily circulated via the TEIREP list server at
UICVM. Documents originating with the Committee would be
allocated numbers by the Chair. TEI paper A1 documents the
numbering scheme to used.
 
EM mentioned that she had prepared and would circulate a DTD for
formal Greek tragedy; RA that he would circulate the tagset being used
for the large Bellcore corpus of modern English.
 
SJ summarised the chief points emerging from preliminary
discussion on the previous day.
\begin{itemize}
\item The committee was to propose a format for interchange of
texts. Its guidelines should be good enough not to require
enforcement. The format should rely on descriptive markup. The
work should be staged, beginning with matters of most concern to
most people, and should take account of the range of expertise
available in the Committee.
\item There would be three meetings in all, two of these in
Europe. Up to half of officially appointed members' travel expenses plus a smal
l
per diem would be reimbursed from TEI funds. Information on travel
costs should be sent in advance to the Chair. All receipts and
claims after meetings should be sent to  Michael Sperberg-McQueen
in Chicago.
\item Although descriptive markup would be used, the need to
cater for the description of existing printed or manuscript texts
was also recognised. Some users of the scheme would be interested
in the physical description of a source, others in its logical
structure and yet others in the relationship between the two.
\item The guidelines must be simple to use and well documented if
they were to be acceptable. The AAP standard (for example) was
unusable largely because it was so poorly documented. SDR had a
detailed critique of the AAP tagset which he would make
available. In this connexion, AR mentioned that he would make
available an introductory guide to using Waterloo GML.
\end{itemize}
 
\section{Committee Workplan}
\begin{enumerate}
\item There had been much discussion of character set
recommendations. For interchange WO had urged the use of the
intersection of the non-National characters of the ASCII/EBCDIC
character sets only, excluding for example ! and [. Mechanisms
needed to be defined for mapping between an interchange format
dependent on e.g. the sort of escape systems used by TuSTEP and a
more appropriate 8 bit internal representation. RC observed that
the guidelines were intended to be viable for at least five
years, which meant that prohibiting use of emerging 8 bit
standards for interchange would be increasingly out of step with
the dp industry. SH suggested that a good first step would be to
specify existing code sets and collect character sets currently
in use. SDR raised the problem of encodings for languages which
have no writing system. It was noted that specifying which
encoding scheme a text used was a matter for the Text
Documentation Committee. SDR, WO and SH agreed to form a
subcommittee to draft recommendations in this area.
\item It was agreed that the languages to be covered in the
initial phase would be all nine of the official languages of the
European Community (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German,
Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish).
Ancient versions of these languages (notably classical
Greek and Latin) were also essential, and a consideration of
Slavic languages thought highly desirable. It had been agreed
that in the first phase of the TEI's work only alphabetic writing
systems would be considered.
\item In an attempt to allocate responsibility for work areas, a
long list of different types of text for which the guidelines
might be helpful was produced, and then roughly grouped. Text-
types considered included the following: Scientific papers;
instructions; treaties; legal texts; office documents;
biography; novel; prayers; sermons; poetry; drama; diaries;
polemic; critical editions with apparatus; synoptic editions;
corpora; newspapers; historical sources;  philosophical
texts ...
 
It was noted that all of these had some structural elements in
common (e.g. paragraph, heading, note, title, extract, author,
layout...) and agreed that the best course would be to identify a
set of core tags by examining what should be tagged in a variety
of well-defined document classes, and to collect any existing
widely-used tagsets. This work was allocated as follows:
\begin {description}
\item [MT] Tags characteristic of historical sources: e.g.
apparatus criticus, data representation
\item [RC] Technical, scientific and office documents
\item [EM] Literary texts e.g. epic, poems, novels, drama
\item [SJ] Sample corpora
\item [SJ-nominee] Legal texts
\item [AR] Philosophical texts
\item [RHC] \footnote{i.e. Robin Cover, not present at the meeting
but deputed for by SDR} Religious texts
\end {description}
As well as specifying what elements needed encoding, the above
will propose candidate core elements to DC who will use these in
combination with the AAP tag set to prepare a set of `core tags'.
\end{enumerate}
\section {Next Meeting}
This will take place in Europe, possibly at the Max-Planck Inst. f\"{u}r
Geschichte, G\"{o}ttingen, in late October or early November.
\end{document}
