Experts and newbies on TEI-L [Was Re: Re: Converting from any HTML to TEI]

> I understand that TEI-L is devoted to solving problems at the
> expert level, but we newbies could sure use some occasional
> instruction, sometimes in words of one syllable or less!
>

I think this is quite a serious MISunderstanding, and if it happens to be
widespread, it can only hurt the list and the ideas and practices it tries
to serve.

I "lurked" on this list, via its archived version, for a long time, though I
only started to sound off after retirement from the Academic madhouse gave
me the chance to do some serious scholarly work again, which happened to
entail involvement with encoding. Nothing I have ever seen here strikes me
as bearing out the view that it is a forum for experts only.

On the contrary, I get the impression that people on the whole receive
advice at the level at which they request it. Highly technical queries get
highly technical answers. Beginners' questions are answered in what is
intended to be a readily comprehensible way, even if the practice doesn't
always quite match that intention.

This is, after all, a list that serves Humanities scholarship, which is an
endemically polysyllabic domain, and rightly so. The inhabitants of that
domain mainly got their residence visas through demonstrating intellectual
ability and stamina, so the belief that computing matters are intrinsically
too hard for otherwise highly-tuned academic minds is rather puzzling,
though the prevalence and resilience of that belief is undeniable.

That said, I think I can see how the notion that this is an expert's forum
where neophytes can expect few concessions and little assistance may have
arisen. I've claimed that elementary questions get appropriately elementary
answers, but before that can happen, those elementary questions actually
have to be asked. I suspect that some of the "silent majority" on this list
(some of whom occasionally ask me, and I'm sure other active posters too,
for advice off-list, in the email equivalent of a plain envelope) are
worried about the fact that they just don't understand some of the questions
and answers they read here. But that is most likely because the dialogue
that has them bemused happened to be begun, and consequently was also
continued, at a fairly advanced technical level. This is not a cyberspatial
"pas devant les domestiques": the parties involved are in good faith
assuming the level of expertise that their interlocutors have already
indicated or demonstrated. They are not knowingly trying to exclude or
intimidate silent and invisible bystanders of whom they know nothing.

It would be futile to try to make every posting on every topic immediately
comprehensible to every participant, passive as well as active, in the list.
So the true test is not whether some posts go above a number of readers'
heads, but whether some aspect of the way we "regulars" express ourselves
creates the impression that only "high level" or abstruse matters will
receive appropriate and productive attention. Once created, that impression
is of course self-reinforcing: the more inimidated newcomers feel, the less
likely they are to speak out.

All those of us who have taught class know how troublesome these
unarticulated group dynamics can be; and most of us in due course acquired
the knack of picking up silent unease from the back row and bringing people
in to a discussion. Alas, WebCams or no, there is no way to exercise that
knack when "talking" to a computer screen, nor is there ever likely to be.

I am reliably told that some of the more bizarre problems that crop up in
"agony aunt" columns have been fabricated in-house by journalists. Maybe we
old hands should sometimes post simple questions just to get things rolling.
After all, that method was good enough for Socrates.

Michael Beddow