walker@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM (Don Walker) (11/14/89)
MELLON FOUNDATION SUPPORTS INTERNATIONAL TEXT ENCODING PROJECT
WITH $100,000 GRANT
The Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for
Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing are pleased to announce that The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation has awarded a two-year $100,000 grant to support the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI). The TEI, which is jointly sponsored by these three
organizations, is a major international project to develop guidelines for the
preparation and exchange of machine-readable texts for scholarly research and
to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries.
The project is being undertaken in response to the pressing need for a common
text encoding scheme, demonstrated by the present chaotic diversity of formats
now in use. The availability of these guidelines will make it possible for
research groups to share data collections, which are both costly and
time-consuming to develop.
Over 50 scholars from North America, Europe, and the Middle East are involved
in TEI's effort to create sets of tags for marking features of texts. The tag
sets, coded in the framework provided by the Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML), will provide the means to mark physical features of text such
as character sets and page layout. They will also provide discipline-specific
tag sets to mark the results of research on the text, such as the analysis of
sentence syntax or the identification of the metrical structure of verse.
Representatives of 15 scholarly and professional organizations form an Advisory
Board for the TEI, in order to ensure that all of the needs and interests of
the research community are adequately addressed.
The planning phase of this project was inaugurated by a $20,000 grant from the
United States National Endowment for the Humanities, which later awarded a
$185,000 grant to implement the first two years of a four-year work plan to
produce the encoding guidelines. The TEI has also received a $100,000 grant
from the European Economic Community.