Introduction to TEI

Dr James Tripp

University of Warwick

Plan

  • Digital editions
  • Text Encoding Initiative
  • Today

Digital editions

Examples

William Godwin Diary

Catologue Digital Editions

Van Gogh Letters

TEI Publisher Registry

Why?

“Scholarly digital editions (or SDEs) offer the opportunity to overcome the limitations of print technology. The new possibilities have a fundamental impact on the theory and methodology of critical editing in general. The large corpus of research literature on digital scholarly editing is full of discussion about new features, functions, properties and characteristics of this kind of scholarly endeavour and how this changes our practices, our theoretical grounds and our goals.”

Sahle (2016)

What?

  • Digitise and archive the document. Create a representation of a physical document (e.g., letter from Van Gogh) in a digital plain text file.

  • Enrich the text and encode additional features. Structure such as paragraphs, strikethrough, editorial comments, uncertainty.

  • Machine readable. Can be turned into rich websites such as Godwin’s diary and filtered for computational analysis.

Text Encoding Initiative

Who?

How?

  • Publish guidelines for encoding documents

  • Create XML files using text editors which read the guidelines

  • Community offering training, conferences and journals articles

Today

  • Use the TEI guidelines

  • Create a digital version of entries from George Orwell’s Political Diaries

  • Use the OxygenXML editor

References

Sahle, Patrick. 2016. “What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices 1: 1939.