LINGUIST List 5.823

Tue 19 Jul 1994

FYI: Deconstruction, Newgroup Request, TEI Guidelines

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , A critique of deconstruction from a linguistics standpoint?
2. "Lic. Luis Antonio Araiza Gaytan", Newgroup Request For Discussion
3. "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen", TEI Guidelines

Check out a book I've been recommending to everybody recently:

 Ellis, John M. (1993) Language, Thought, and Logic. Northwestern
 University Press.

It's not so much a critique of "deconstruction" (although the author has
written one such, and one gets pointers to it here) as it is a critique
of the entire enterprise of "Theory of Language", which overlaps the
academic disciplines of Philosophy, Literature, Anthropology, and --
yes, this means you! -- Linguistics, from a unique and wonderfully
detailed vantage point. The thing I liked most about the book was how
well it was written. And how it didn't stand for any bullshit at all.

Bravo!

Cheers,
-j

 Expert Systems in Developing Countries
 News Group Creation Proposal

Currently existing news groups in the area of Artificial Intelligence
provide very interesting materials regarding fundamentals of AI, research
tools, bibliography, etc. (e.g. comp.ai of Usenet). This proposed group will
focus on practical issues concerning the expert system development,
providing basic information to scientists from other disciplines who are
beginning to use expert system technology in their research and development
projects.

This news group will have the following objectives:

 - Support for direct communication between research groups.

 - Identification of individuals and research institutions developing
 expert systems.

 - Identification of similar projects and areas of application.

 - Providing information and exchanging experience about expert system
 tools and development methodologies.

 - Supporting communication of joint projects.

The group will be in accordance to Internet/Usenet rules and the proposed
name is:

 comp.ai.expsys

It will also be a moderated group. This means that not all contributions
will be posted but only those which help to achieve the objectives already
mentioned. The moderators will be

 Luis Araiza <laraizacampus.mty.itesm.mx>, and
 Horacio Martinez <hmartinecampus.mty.itesm.mx>

The Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in
Monterrey, Mexico will host and moderate the group under a grant by the
International Development Research Centre from Canada.

If you have any comments about this proposal, please post to the
corresponding news group and also to the following email address:

 expsysalfa.mty.itesm.mx

Thanks.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Readers of this newsgroup (or list) may be interested in the recent
publication of the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Electronic
Text Encoding and Interchange. The material below describes what the
Guidelines are and why you might care about them; appended is a
description of how to acquire them in paper form or retrieve them in
electronic form. Please feel free to re-post this material to other
appropriate lists and groups. My apologies if this information is
tangential to the interests of the list, or you have already seen it
before, especially if it has already been posted here --- my record
keeping has been disrupted. Thanks. -CMSMcQ

-----

 TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE PUBLISHES GUIDELINES

In May, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) published its
"Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange."

This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred
experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient
Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic
text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of
computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The
format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial
software packages.

The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly
incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse
of data among researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts
is an expensive and time-consuming business. The object of the TEI was
to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful
even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete.
This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly
evolving computer industry.

To make them "future-proof", the TEI Guidelines use an international
standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized
Markup Language. SGML was originally developed by the publishing
industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of
electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software
developers, publishers, and government agencies. It is one of the
enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take
shape.

The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in
use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as
teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals.
They must be both easily extensible and easily simplified. And their
aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in
all languages and writing systems, from any period in history.

Consequently, the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for
the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama, and other
performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic
research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks.

The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of
electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These
specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic
texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed
texts.

The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added
to the set of basic recommendations. These include methods for encoding
hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts),
representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates,
representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing
of texts for corpus-linguistic study. The Guidelines also define
methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and
commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity.

The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant
support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities,
Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the
volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share
their experience in using computers and to work out the specific
recommendations in the Guidelines.

The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the
area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association
for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics,
which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and
researchers worldwide.

Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their
intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large
scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the
world of humanities scholarship.

The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the
Internet. For more information see the description of availability and
distribution mechanisms appended below.