I continue to be fascinated by the fundamental problem of representing texts—I’m thinking of literary texts in particular (and, lately, poetry, especially), and the many solutions (all variously imperfect) that people use. I have in mind all the various technologies that folks use to represent texts (whether remediating historical texts or authoring their own). This could include complicated, semantically rich models like that of the TEI, to that most ubiquitous of markup formats—HTML, or the lean, simplified “markup” of Markdown. We could also think about the related tools (from XSLT or Pandoc… or, my latest favorite and a real dark horse in this race, Pollen), which can make such texts usable in different ways.

I’d be happy to meet and talk with people of any level of experience (seriously! if TEI/HTML/Markdown are all equally befuddling terms, this could be a session to hash what they mean!) about the passion and perils of text encoding.