TEI (short for Text Encoding Initiative) is a method for encoding, or marking up, texts in such a way that humans and computers can make sense of them. It is a set of guidelines for electronic editing that facilitates the digitization and transcription of textual material. The guidelines are maintained by the TEI Consortium, which provides extensive resources for for marking up all kinds of text into digital format. Their recommendations mostly consist of rules for using various “tags” to mark up certain textual elements, such as <line> to indicate a line of text, <del>, to indicate deleted text, and <person>, for a reference to a person.
You might be wondering why someone would want to go through the trouble of marking up a text for digitization, when scanning it is so much quicker and easier. There are many ways to answer this question, but let's look at one specific affordance of TEI, which is facilitating deep and complex search of textual material. The Willa Cather Archive, a digital archive of the author's novels, stories, nonfiction, letters, and journalism, offers both electronic text and high-quality scanned images of the same works. We can specifically see the TEI at work in Cather's correspondance. Here, a seemingly simple search tool reveals a precision and complexity that you wouldn't get with just a direct transcription or scanned images.
Besides encoding text for searching, you might provide a diplomatic transcription, reproducing the typography the manuscript original, or encode editorial and authorial changes to a text over time. Because TEI is built to be customizable, many projects develop their own standards based on one of the existing guidelines, tailoring them to capture the key features of their source text.
For today's workshop, we will be delving into the workings of TEI and practice using it hands-on. You will leave having accomplished the following:
- Understand what TEI is and why it's used.
- Recognize the basic structure of a TEI document.
- Practice using a specific subset of TEI guidelines to encode a manuscript.
- First, we will examine the guidelines, getting a brief overview of a basic TEI document and some of the key elements.
- Second, I will demostrate a quick tutorial on how to implement a specific subset of the guidelines, drawing elements from the Primary Source Editing module.
- Finally, for rest the workshop, you will get the opportunity to practice TEI by encoding a manuscript page (in groups), and we will share our work.
What is TEI?
What is XML?
Modules and Modeling
Basic Architecture
Preliminary Questions for Document Analysis
Elements for Primary Source Encoding
Try it yourself!
Next Steps
Birnbaum, David J. “What is XML and Why Should Humanists Care?”
Caughie, Emily Datskou and Rebecca Parker. “Storm Clouds on the Horizon: Feminist Ontologies and the Problem of Gender.” Feminist Modernist Studies, 1:3, 230-242, 2018. Web.
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. 2001.
Text Encoding Initiative - Consortium (TEI-C), "TEI: Text Encoding Initiative".
Women Writers Project, "What is the TEI?".
Workshop leader: Filipa Calado, Graduate Center Digital Fellows
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.