TEI Vanilla - a scoop of TEI for everyone

Following the spontaneous but inspiring exchange on e-editiones Slack channel, we'd like to invite you to a new e-editiones community meeting to discuss the emerging TEI Vanilla proposal. The event will take place online at 4pm CET on October 20th, 2020.

Many of us at some point expressed their frustration with starting a TEI project. Without previous experience with this extensive and robust vocabulary the learning curve may be quite steep and the whole process overwhelming.

TEI Vanilla is a grassroots movement to help newcomers to the TEI community in smooth on-boarding. We feel that a number of prospective users, both individual and institutional, would benefit from a gentler introduction than TEI's excellent but extensive Guidelines provide.

Vanilla is meant to pick up where earlier 2015 TEI Simple project, led by the late Sebastian Rahtz, Martin Mueller and Brian Pytlik-Zillig, left off. As some of you would remember, main outcome of the TEI Simple was the TEI Processing Model, now lying at the heart of the TEI Publisher. Nevertheless, the other goal envisioned for Simple was creating a schema which would provide a good starting point for majority, if not most, larger scale editorial projects. We based our selection on a survey of usage through large volume corpora, among them EEBO-TCP and DTA, and believed it to be a solid 80/20 solution: addressing 80% of users needs with 20% of the effort and heartache.

Thanks to the space for discussion on e-editiones Slack we found out there are many like-minded individuals willing to join forces in the work of reviewing the schema and working on its own dedicated Guidelines and a body of examples, tutorials and other auxiliary resources.

At this point we would like to share our motivations and preliminary goals but above all solicit opinions, perspectives and requirements from our community. Join us for the event and share your thoughts on Slack.