Now that I have all of the TEI Council minutes in XML which is more or less valid against TEI-All, I can start worrying about defining a sensible schema for them, oh bliss. One possibility might be just to accept and preserve every tagging decision taken during the long history of this archive, even the silly ones. Another might be to retro-convert everything to a single brutalist vision of how things Ought To Be. Or somewhere between the two extremes, perhaps.
Over the last 23 years, different editors of TC minutes have taken different views in all the places where you might expect them to. Even in the days when minutes were prepared in kosher TEI, mostly conforming to TEI Lite, there was still plenty of scope for different practice. Shall we distinguish soCalled, and mentioned, q and quote, term and emph? Are we consistent in using emph for linguistic emphasis rather than formatting? Do we distinguish q and quote, and if so, for why? If we have gi and att (or occasionally ident type=’att’) do we also need tag, and code and ident?
In more recent times, when such ontological anxieties have become perhaps less feverish, the minutes use a comparatively restricted set of distinctions, mostly to do with whether a snippet of text is in italic or bold, or used as a heading or a link, or is a list item. Indeed, sometimes the tagging decisions we see in the XML file are purely an artefact of the formatting tweaks needed to present the minutes on the WordPress website and have little to do with document structure or meaning. And in sadly many cases, if a semantically tagged version of such documents ever existed, it is now lost. Should we, in the interests of consistency, enforce the lowest common denominator across the whole set of documents?
Consistency at least in the way major components of each document are presented would surely be advantageous. To take a simple example, every set of minutes begins with a list of the persons participating in the meeting. Sometimes it is presented as a list of items; sometimes as a single paragraph; sometimes as a sequence of paragraphs. Almost always the names of individual attendees are associated with a siglum or set of initials, but the way in which this is all represented in the XML structure varies considerably. This sort of thing is easy, if time consuming, to make consistent. And probably something like the current conventions, in which each person’s name is given as a distinct <item> within a <list> should be aimed for, since it is clear that the various ways these lists are currently presented is really only an accident of formatting, changes which are of much lesser interest than ease of processing the list in various ways. Whether or not the full TEI paraphernalia linking occurrences of a person’s initials in the text to their appearance in the list of attendees, is another question.
Of courser, if we were starting this exercise from zero, we would follow the textbooks and first carry out a data analysis. What are the important entities in a set of minutes, and what are their properties? Each of these documents relates to a meeting which took place over one or more days, in a specific place, or in cyberspace, with a specified set of participants. The minutes indicate the topics discussed, to some extent formalised in terms of identified issues, or action points. We might also ask what sorts of research questions should our analysis facilitate: how often do particular individuals or kinds of individual intervene? How long does it take for an issue to be resolved? How many different issues are under consideration at a particular time? Where do issues come from? And so on.
But we are not starting this exercise from scratch. The documents already exist. Moreover, the conceptual entities they are concerned with, and therefore represent, change over time, reflecting the Council’s evolution both in terms of its practice and its sense of purpose. That purpose has always been to maintain and develop the technical content of the TEI Guidelines, of course; but with the availability of sophisticated issue-tracking and reporting software the way in which this is carried out has changed a great deal. Consequently the operational model – the modus operandi – of the Council has also changed a great deal. These changes are necessarily reflected in the organization and content of the minutes.
Writing a full history of the TEI Council’s evolution is not however the purpose of this document, tempting though it is. A few salient aspects of that history do however affect our document analysis. For example, it’s necessary to understand that when first set up, the Council worked very much in the same way as the original TEI project: its role was largely to initiate, supervise, and integrate work carried out in more or less autonomous working groups. This had worked well for some major expansions of the P5 Guidelines, such as the addition of manuscript description, or character encoding issues following the adoption of Unicode, where the TEI had been able to constitute a motivated and informed group of experts to produce concrete proposals; less well in areas where such a group proved harder to constitute or motivate. For the first five years of its existence, from 2002 to the publication of TEI P5 1.0.0 in 2007, however, the Council’s minutes are full of reports from specific working groups, and actions on someone to pursue them.
This was also a period during which the TEI enjoyed the luxury of two paid editors. The process by which the Council itself took over editorial responsibility probably started with the full scale review of the first draft of P5, in which each chapter was assigned to a Council member for review, though actual implementation of changes to the Guidelines (which involved a content management system called perforce) remained a specialised activity, not available to all. The minutes from this period necessarily therefore have many “action points” aimed specifically at the editors.
For releases 1.0.1 to 2.7.0 (2008 to 2014) the following formulation of the Council’s role appeared on the PDF title page
TEI P5:
Guidelines for Electronic Text
Encoding and Interchange
by the TEI Consortium
Originally edited by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou
Burnard for the ACH-ALLC-ACL Text Encoding Initiative
Now entirely revised and expanded under the supervision
of the Technical Council of the TEI Consortium
edited by Lou Burnard and Syd Bauman
Only in September 2014, with the 2.7.0 release, did that last line disappear, establishing finally that the Council was now editorially responsible for the whole.
By this date the Council’s modus operandi had also changed considerably. Already, in 2009, we find the Council reviewing and acting on proposals for change to the Guidelines known as “feature requests”, originating from the wider TEI community rather than from the Council or the Board. A key step towards expanding this practice was the adoption of the open source issue tracker provided by sourceforge, which hosted the TEI Guidelines source from 2007 onwards, and remains a recognizable forerunner of the current github based system.
The move to such systems has several implications for the current archival project. Firstly it means that a substantial amount of the TEI’s intellectual history is now exhaustively documented, including all sorts of crazy ideas and false starts and frequent repetition, but all on a platform which the TEI itself does not own or control. Secondly, it means that the links into the documentary base provided by those external systems and the more diplomatic narrative constructions provided by the current minutes are really quite important if we wish to develop a proper historical understanding. And finally, of course, the availability of this detailed repository of issues and their resolution has changed dramatically the way the TEI Council does its work.