The DARIAH Working Group on Lexical Resources has been named winner of the 2020 Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity in recognition of their work on TEI Lex-0, a technical specification and a set of community-based recommendations for encoding machine-readable dictionaries.
“We are delighted by the news,” said Toma Tasovac, DARIAH Director and co-chair of the WG Lexical Resources. “TEI Lex-0 has already been seminal in propelling the interoperability debate in the lexicographic community, in championing the importance of open standards, and in pushing for more consistency in the adoption and implementation of the TEI Guidelines.”
The Working Group on Lexical Resources is a self-organized team working under the auspices of the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU). Its work on TEI Lex-0 is also supported by ELEXIS, a H2020-funded project which proposes to integrate, extend and harmonize national and regional efforts in the field of lexicography.
“The momentum that we created in modelling lexicographic data could serve as an inspiration to other communities that need precise application profiles of the TEI Guidelines,” said WG co-chair Laurent Romary. “Like Epidoc before us, we have engaged both the members of our community and the TEI Guidelines as a whole, while also developing an infrastructure for the sustainable management of the specification and an online presence that is intended to provide maximal visibility to the results.”
TEI Lex-0 is developed as an open-source project in the GitHub repository of the DARIAH WG Lexical Resources. It is also available for online consultation.
The Working Group has worked diligently on cultivating the use of TEI among lexicographers and humanities scholars researching lexicographic heritage.
As a result of that work, TEI Lex-0 has been recognized as one of the two official interchange formats (together with Ontolex-Lemon) of the European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS), which currently has 17 partner and 50 observer institutions from 35 countries.
In addition to creating customized TEI Lex-0 Guidelines for lexicographic data, the team has contributed to the development of TEI itself by submitting and getting accepted a number of tickets proposing changes to the TEI Guidelines, and by publishing a number of scholarly articles.
TEI Lex-0 and best practices in lexical data modeling using TEI have been introduced to more than 90 young scholars from across Europe at a number of training events including Lexical Data Masterclasses in 2017 and 2018, as well as the Lisbon Summer School in Linguistics in 2018 and 2019.
This Rahtz Prize is awarded by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium to an individual or team judged to have made a significant contribution to the consortium’s mission of developing and maintaining a set of high-quality guidelines for the encoding of humanities texts, and supporting their use by a wide community of projects, institutions, and individuals.
