Abstract
This article provides a brief overview of currently-available digital resources for learning to understand and use the TEI Guidelines. It reflects on and analyzes these resources and their audience through the results of a survey intended to inform future support from the TEI Consortium for novice users. Increasing numbers of students look online for self-directed and task-based tutorials, and increasing numbers of scholars in the humanities recognize the TEI Guidelines as a standard tool for publication and analysis. In this context, the author designed the survey presented in this paper to solicit qualitative feedback from both experienced and aspiring practitioners in the field concerning their skills, needs, and goals, pedagogical as well as technical. The article suggests revising and expanding TEI community resources, proposing possibilities for their new form and functionality.
Highlights
As will be discussed later in this subsection, certain users find that the absence of integrated XSLT resources on the TEI by Example site falls short of their needs
45 The survey results suggest that the improvement of Grade I support for learning the TEI Guidelines in a digital environment is deeply tied to the current needs of experts in the field
The same resources that will benefit experts—massive open corpora of TEI-encoded text and improvement of the navigability of the digitized TEI Guidelines— will benefit learners, through establishing a source for a compendium of examples suitable for inductive learning and through enabling users to efficiently find the sections of the Guidelines that serve their purposes
Summary
10 Participants conducted academic or research activities in a broad range of historic and modern languages, with diverse alphabets and temporal frames of use. Seventy-four listed other programming languages with which they were comfortable working; 66 people responded that they had heard of the TEI prior to beginning the survey, while four said that they had not. The majority of respondents were generally comfortable with basic web technologies and commercial software. Comments generated by the question “What description most closely matches your current position?” suggested that library staff should have been explicitly offered as a choice among the closed options; five people described themselves in the comments as library-affiliated. 12 In short, the respondents were largely well-educated, middle-aged, listing English as the language they speak most often, not necessarily as the language of their greatest fluency, and affiliated with an educational or cultural heritage institution in the Northern Hemisphere
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