philtag n=“6“: Workshop on Encoding Methods for Electronic Texts
Toward a Data Grid for the Arts and Humanities. The competence center for e-Philology at the Institute for German philology held the 6th workshop on 12th and 13th October.
The slogan of this international meeting was "text encoding: baseline & more." Experts from the fields of literature and data processing tried to answer the question of how to reasonable apply the international encoding standard TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). This standard defines a reference system for a variety of electronic texts. It creates the basis for texts in electronic form to be indexed and referenced just like printed text available via library catalogues. TEI, at times of change in media formats, thus helps keep the cultural heritage alive. This year, participants dealt mainly with problems of encoding dictionaries and text editions, and the electronic tools that are available for such purposes including Grid-enabled tools that are curently developed for the Humanities.
The discussion was opened by Lou Burnard (Oxford University Computing Services, European editor of TEI Guidelines) with a presentation on the development of version TEI P5. As a highlight, the prototype of TextGrid's client application TextGridLab was presented by Thorsten Vitt (Technical University of Darmstadt). TextGridLab is a grid-enabled workbench for processing, analysing, annotating, editing and publishing data in the Philologies and in adjacent disciplines. Peter Robinson (Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham) gave a talk on "Building Distributed Editions around Unified Identifiers".
In a hands-on session in the afternoon, accompanied by Laurent Romary (Max Planck Digital Library) and Lou Burnard, the participants learned how to create, implement and customise a TEI5 schema. A round-table discussion on further talks in the area of digital editing and dictionary encoding rounded off the session.
The detailed program of the meeting, see at 
Würzburg University.