I was struck by this terrific post on TEI by Lee Bessette at Inside Higher Ed:

Epiphany: TEI is Scholarship
www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/epiphany-tei-scholarship

and especially her realization that “The text that the person on the other side of the computer screen eventually will read and interact with will be entirely mediated by the decisions I make as an encoder.”

I’ve been interested by this aspect of markup for a long time–SGML, XML, TEI, whatever you like–but hear less and less discussion of it, or of any newly creative uses of markup to explore the texture of textual interpretation. (There is no category for “markup” or “TEI” in this blog.) Instead, it seems like people (especially those of us at THATCamp as opposed to those attending Digital Humanities 2012 in Germany; or maybe its just the DH folks I follow on Twitter) find TEI to be too complicated, too rigid, too much work, too concerned with standards, etc. etc. Or maybe it’s just pro forma now, a complicated but routinized task associated with putting up full-text primary document collections that usually have a literary focus?

Disruption seems to be one emerging theme of the conference. So, since I still care about markup, and am about to ramp up work again on an interpretive markup project (see http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-692.html ). I wonder if anyone else is interested in talking about thinking about markup (TEI or otherwise) as blatant interpretation, and what we could do with that? Following from Mills Kelly I’m thinking TEI as obsfuscation, TEI rigged with some sort of randomness generator, TEI as performance art… or even, hey, just the XSLT, in psychedelic colors and comic sans font?

Susan
@footnotesrising