Towards shared TEI model/s for institutional minutes and protocols – protokolleditionen.eu

Authors: Kurz, Stephan / Jüngerkes, Sven

Date: Thursday, 7 September 2023, 4:15pm to 5:45pm

Location: Main Campus, L 1 <campus:stage>

Abstract

A group of scholarly editors working on TEI editions of minutes/protocols is working on common best practices for editing this textual genre. The »Arbeitskreis Digitale Protokolleditionen« group underlines the collaborative and social aspect of TEI editing. Its proposed poster hence does not claim to present results but intends to showcase and encourage a collaborative culture of encoding.

Following a panel at the DHd2022 conference,1 a group of scholarly editors working on TEI based editions of minutes (mostly from the political sphere at the moment) from the German speaking countries has met on a regular basis to exchange experiences, markup choices and common ground for exchanging data. In 2023, this loose group rebranded itself as Arbeitskreis Digitale Protokolleditionen.2

To date, the discussions within that group have targeted

  • roles and functions of minutes/protocols
  • TEI modelling decisions and formalizing of preexisting editing guidelines
  • extraction of tei:listEvent data for defining an API for common calendar applications3
  • strategies for reuse of prosopographical auxiliary/indexing data
  • best practices and tools for manual, semi-automatic and automatised edition data enrichment
  • sharing and reuse of bibliographical data, e.g. through Zotero

The poster aims to showcase the opportunities of collaboration across a variety of institutional backgrounds. It serves as an example that the intellectual infrastructure of a common vocabulary (=subset/s of the TEI guidelines) provides chances to discuss, among other issues,

  • common ground between DH technologists and domain specialist editors
  • possible ways of extracting overlaps in data
  • while minimising data input duplication

These efforts are based on voluntary contribution of the Arbeitskreis members which relies on willingness for formal-informal potlatch style giving and taking, and on the institutional support of the democratic and academic institutions that fund digital editions of minutes. Apart from the concrete example that deals with retro-projecting ideas of open data into the past by unlocking (administrative) written fixations of institutional negotiations and decision making processes, we want to emphasize the inherent social impact of the TEI guidelines: They are a catalyst for discussing important questions of scholarly editing.

Notes

  1. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6328072. ↩

  2. https://www.protokolleditionen.eu/ ↩

  3. This relates to ongoing TEI-C discussions on the model of tei:event, cf. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3447297; https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/2382 and related. ↩

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