More Light, Less Lite: A Text Encoding Guide for Literary Scholars

The Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) has received two years of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a detailed Encoding Guide for projects wishing to encode early printed books (roughly 1400-1850) using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. This Guide would generalize from the WWP's experience and provide detailed and explicit guidance on the elements and decisions involved in the encoding of early printed books, while taking into account such variables as project needs, funding, and available time.

The audience for this effort is one that is not currently well served by the TEI's existing documentation. The TEI Guidelines themselves are a compendious resource which famously provide comparatively little specific guidance on applying the Guidelines to specific project needs; mature projects which have trained technical staff are able to grasp the principles of the TEI and develop project-specific methods, but individual humanities scholars who are unfamiliar with text encoding may find this process much more difficult. There does not currently exist comprehensive documentation written for non-technical humanities scholars on how to develop a TEI encoding practice, or even how to decide what kind of encoding would be appropriate for a given set of materials. The Encoding Guide is thus aimed at individual humanities scholars, directors of small projects, or managers who wish to get a more topical overview of this particular area of the TEI Guidelines. The need for such documentation is now becoming much greater, as new XML publication tools come within the reach of individuals and small projects, and as interest in digital research becomes more widespread.

The Encoding Guide has the potential to offer important benefits to text encoding projects of all sizes. It may enable individual scholars and small projects to start work more quickly and with greater confidence, without having to grapple with all of the TEI Guidelines or replicate fundamental encoding wisdom. It may also provide projects of any size with an alternative to TEI Lite. Finally and most importantly, it could help ensure greater consistency between projects working on similar materials, and give them a shared basis for discussion and further refinement of their encoding practice.

A number of important issues and questions have already emerged from this effort, and this paper will discuss these in detail. First of all, given that the Encoding Guide will be published electronically, what is the best form for online documentation to take? Even the TEI Guidelines, which describe digital publication in such detail, do not themselves exemplify effective online documentation: in fact, their digital presence is limited to sectioned HTML/XML and PDF files, with some hyperlinking. The Encoding Guide will need to serve not only as a developmental narrative for use during the learning process, but also as a reference work, and one challenge for its writers will be how to handle this dual rhetorical function effectively, economically, and gracefully.

Second, to what extent can text encoding principles be separated from a discussion of specific tags and DTDs? One important premise of the Guide is that essential concepts of literary text encoding transcend the TEI and its specific methods—and further, that these concepts can and should be treated as a natural link between the disciplinary methods with which scholars are already familiar and the text encoding issues which they seek to grasp. One underlying problem the Guide will address, then, is the perception that text encoding is about "technology", an assumption which often serves to intimidate or misdirect scholars unfamiliar with the field. This problem is especially significant because humanities text encoding projects must involve humanities scholars in their methodological decisions, even if those scholars will not be directly involved in encoding texts. The Guide will therefore attempt to establish a useful high-level grasp of text encoding issues even among scholars who never touch a keyboard.

Finally, how can the expertise of the many existing TEI projects best be brought together in a Guide of this sort? Although the Guide will draw specifically on the work and documentation of the Women Writers Project, it will also need to take account of significant work being done elsewhere: work that both duplicates and extends the area of the WWP's expertise. The Guide's authors have compiled a list of projects on which to draw for examples, documentation, and research to enrich the scope and authority of the Guide.

The proposed paper will explore all of these issues in greater depth, and will report on the progress made and the challenges encountered during the first year of this two-year project.