What is TEI? What can you do with it? How can one get started with TEI editing? What avenues exist for publishing online with TEI encoded projects?
TEI (or the Text Encoding Initiative) is a way to prepare archival documents to be coded and searched electronically. This session aims to explore TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) through an examination of two mark up projects: the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/ and a digital edition of Virgil’s Aeneid (dissertation).
In addition to understanding how one can use an XML editing tool like <Oxygen> www.oxygenxml.com/, the session will illustrate the process for coding texts in basic structural ways along with more in-depth interpretive ways or tagging.
Time will also be spent exploring traditional publishing platforms such as XTF xtf.cdlib.org/ and more recent initiatives such TAPAS www.northeastern.edu/nulab/tapas/ It will also examine the state of cutting edge XML tools such as Juxta Editions.
I hope I will be able to attend this session. I became interested in TEI after looking at the (Brown) Women Writers Project, and I would love to hear more about resources and ways to learn TEI through self study.
I’m especially interested in how the second and third paragraphs interface with the fourth: some people tag texts and prepare TEI documents, and others write software to organize and display the texts, but they’re different groups of people who don’t always interact and have different goals. TEI is flexible and offers diverse methods for accomplishing diverse goals, and not all CMS offer support for all those methods. Highly-funded projects with their own software engineers can support complex texts with parallel corpora (like translations), annotations, indexing of tagged names and places, linking each word to lexicon entries, and glittering unicorns; off-the-shelf CMS, on the other hand, or presentation stylesheets like Indiana’s TEI Boilerplate often support far less, and some deliver just the raw XML file. What, exactly, will TAPAS support? How many of these CMS and presentation systems offer a clear outline of what parts of TEI they support, and what resources exist for people beginning TEI projects to research their various capabilities in order to choose a suitable platform to meet their needs?
I love the work by the authors of this session proposal to talk about the interpretive decisions involved with TEI. Great opportunity to discuss digital practice as scholarly work.