ThE final frontIer

Stay with me, I promise I'll make it relevant (Source)

TEI is one of those things you really want to get behind, an ideal that makes sense in every way: let's make a system of text encoding that everyone can use and share so that we can all engage with each other's work.

In some ways this seems only natural: academia has standardized almost all (if not all) methods of scholarly communication in different disciplines, whether it be the chemical formulas of scientists or the Modern Language Association's guidelines for writing essays. 

The weird (but, perhaps, predictable) thing about TEI is that it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries much in the same way DH does. This is problematic. TEI is a good starting point but if it acts as the standard for all textual encoding it threatens to be far too complex. As Barbara mentioned and we have seen in our other classes, the more versatile and flexible a system is, the more complicated it has to be and, therefore, the harder it is to understand. TEI is performing its task for multiple disciplines, many of which have had their own standards of academic work for over a century. Take The Chicago Manual of Style: the University of Chicago Press needed a system to deal with the scientific and humanist texts it was publishing.

But this was for academic work specifically. So, although this prescriptive manual of academic communication strictly forbid the use of split infinitives  until 1983, it was fine for the U.S.S. Enterprise 'To Boldly Go' because it wasn't operating under the rigours of the academic discipline (It was surprisingly difficult to work that Trek reference in).

What's my point? The Digital Humanities has been declared as a place where scholarship flirts with entertainment. If that's the case, we need to be careful about how we structure our work, including our encoding, so as to incorporate this new aspect of our work.

So what's the best way to go about this? 

I would argue for sub-classes of the TEI for scholars in similar fields. In fact, some groups working on specific material have already made their own sub-standards based on TEI. This is great, but, as with all things on the internet, we need the discipline to know when too much is enough. If everybody creates their own sub-standards the whole point of a standard is lost. Still, I love that this process allows the 'builders' to develop the systems of notation. If digital humanists can take advantage of the solid foundation TEI has laid down and communicate among different sub-classes about how to adapt, which seems to be the case already, the collaborative ideals so integral to DH can be used to best effect while a structure conducive to academia can be maintained.