The Text Encoding Initiative

What is the Text Encoding Initiative?

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines have long been regarded as the de facto standard for the preparation of digital textual resources in the scholarly research community. For the beginner, they offer a daunting range of possibilities, reflecting the huge range of potential applications for text encoding, from traditional scholarly editions, to language corpora, historical lexicons, digital archives and beyond. Drawing on many examples of TEI-encoded text from a variety of research domains, this simple and straightforward book is intended to help the beginner make their own choices from the full range of TEI options. It explains the XML technology used by the TEI in language accessible to the non-technical reader and provides a guided tour of the many parts of the TEI universe, and how it may be customized to suit an individual project’s needs. This work has been produced with the support of Labex Hastec.

The Text Encoding Initiative

Text Encoding Initiative

Charles F. Goldfarb Saratoga. California If asked for a sure recipe for chaos I would propose a I am delighted that my invention, the Standard project in which several thousand impassioned special Generalized Markup Language, was able to play a ists in scores of disciplines from a dozen or more role in the TEl's magnificent accomplishment, particu countries would be given five years to produce some larly because almost all of the original applications 1300 pages of guidelines for representing the informa of SGML were in the commercial and technological tion models of their specialties in a rigorous, machine realms. It is reasonable, of course, that organiza verifiable notation. Clearly, it would be sociologically tions with massive economic investments in new and and technologically impossible for such a group even changing information should want the benefits of infor to agree on the subject matter of such guidelines, let mation asset preservation and reuse that SGML offers. alone the coding details. But just as clearly as the It is gratifying that the TEl, representing the guardians bumblebee flies despite the laws of aerodynamics, the of humanity's oldest and most truly valuable informa Text Encoding Initiative has actually succeeded in such tion, chose SGML for those same benefits. an effort. The vaunted "information superhighway" would The TEl Guidelines are extraordinary.