TEI By Example

The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)1 has provided a complex
and comprehensive system of provisions for scholarly text
encoding. Although a major focus of the “digital humanities”
domain, there is little evidence that it has been embraced by
and taught to humanities students at university level, which is
important to encourage the adoption of the TEI’s
recommendations and the widespread use of its text encoding
guidelines. Very little training material exists for either
individuals who wish to teach themselves TEI, or university
level teachers who wish to have access to adequate training
materials to use with their classes.
If the digital humanities community wants to promote the TEI
markup framework as a serious candidate for dedicated courses
in the booming curricula on digital humanities, humanities
computing, digital culture, or humanities informatics, to name
just a few of the labels this archipelago of disciplines gets, as
well as integrating the TEI further with digital librarianship,
then there is an urgent need for an on-line TEI course by
example which is less generic than the two tutorials published
on the TEI website (Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard (2002a)
Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard (2002b)) and more user
friendly, comprehensive, and up to date than the “latest” Teach
Yourself TEI materials currently online (all of which date from
2002).2
The TEI By Example3 project is currently developing a range
of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through
the different stages in marking up a document in TEI. TEI By
Example aims to provide online tutorials which give examples
for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of different
document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of
markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those
involved in the marking up of texts. Likewise, the availability
of a software toolkit for teaching text encoding will support the
potential trainers to take up the challenge to teach TEI on
several occasions. In order to support multilingualism in the
text encoding community, the on-line tutorials are being
considered for translation into a number of languages. The
translations proper, however, are outside the scope of this
project.
The deliverables of the project are: on-line tutorials TEI By
Example, a printable PDF version of the tutorials TEI By
Example, an on-line software toolkit for text encoding, a
downloadable CD-ROM image for burning off-line toolkits for
use by course participants, and adequate documentation to
enable the tutorials to be used elsewhere if needed.
Project partners are The Centre for Scholarly Editing and
Document Studies (CTB)4 of the Royal Academy of Dutch
Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities (CCH)5 of King's College London, and the School
for Library, Archive, and Information Studies (SLAIS)6 of
University College London, with an international advisory
board consisting of experts in textual encoding and markup.
The deliverables will be published and hosted by CCH (King's
College London) under endorsement by the Association of
Literary and Linguistic Computing. Development of the tutorials
began in October 2006 and will start to appear online in Spring
2007. It is hoped that the project results will be relevant to the
trainers of TEI, the students of TEI, the text encoding, and the
humanities computing community in general.
A major point of attention at the start of the project was the
status of the TEI model. Since early 2002, the TEI Consortium
has been engaged in a major (backward-incompatible) revision
of the TEI specification, migrating it from version P4 (released
in 2002, see TEI (2004) to P5 (2005 onwards, see TEI (2005)).
Featuring more than just changes in the markup model and the
content of the guidelines, P5 entails an overhaul of the complete
production process of the standard. It seems that the timing of
this TEI By Example project coincides with a turning point in
the transition of TEI P4 to P5: the advantages of P5 adoption
for this project seemed to outweigh the disadvantages of P4.
The most recent snapshot indeed suggests that stability is at
hand (Van den Branden 2006). As a result, the project is
developing materials in P5.
Eight tutorials are under construction. The first, an introduction
to text encoding and the TEI, encourages the user to explore
textual encoding and markup to foster an understanding of why
this is useful, or even necessary, to allow texts to be processed
automatically and used and understood by others. The TEI
header tutorial covers the type of information and metadata
captured in the header element. Three tutorials focus on
examples of individual types of text: Prose, Poetry, and Drama,
and a further two tutorials deal with examples of Manuscript
Transcription and Scholarly Editing. The final tutorial investigates how the TEI can be customized, and the use of
ODD and Roma.
Although under development at time of writing of this poster
proposal, the tutorials will be available for demonstration by
Digital Humanities 2007, and this poster aims to highlight the
format, structure, testing, and development of the tutorials. As
well as informing the academic audience at DH2007, and
publicising the project, this poster will aim for feedback to
allow further development of the online material.
1. <http://www.tei-c.org/>
2. <ttp://www.tei-c.org/Tutorials/index-la
test.html>
3. <http://www.teibyexample.org>
4. <http://www.kantl.be/ctb/>
5. <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanitie
s/cch/>
6. <http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/>
Bibliography
Burnard, Lou, and Syd Bauman, eds. TEI P5: Guidelines for
Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. TEI Consortium,
2005. <http://www.tei-c.org.uk/P5/Guideline
s/index.html>
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and Lou Burnard, eds. TEI P4:
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, XML
Compatible Edition. Oxford: TEI Consortium, 2002. <http:
//www.tei-c.org/P4X/index.html>
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and Lou Burnard. "A Gentle
Introduction to XML." TEI P4: Guidelines for Electronic Text
Encoding and Interchange, XML Compatible Edition. Ed. C.
M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard. Oxford: TEI
Consortium, 2002a. <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/SG
.html>
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and Lou Burnard. TEI Lite: An
introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange. 2002b. <http
://www.tei-c.org/Lite/teiu5_en.html>
Van den Branden, Ron. [TBE-R001] - TEI by Example, Initial
Report, 2006/06/09. 2006. <http://www.kantl.be/ct
b/project/2006/TBE-R001.htm>