Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a membership consortium and international community which, amongst many other things, maintains a community-developed standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. The TEI framework supports the detailed encoding of complex documents and is used extensively by most text encoding Digital Humanities (DH) projects. As an encoding language, it is used to describe both the physical characteristics of a text (line breaks, pagination, special characters, etc.), classify subjects, tag people, places, and events, provide linguistic markup, and to add commentary. The TEI Guidelines very generalised encoding framework which enables many and disparate uses across a wide range of (usually Humanities-based) domains. TEI projects customise their use of the TEI framework through a TEI ODD customisation, often created through web tools such as Roma.
Examples
- Map of Early Modern London
- Orlando
- William Godwin's Diary
- Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World
Further Resources
- The TEI P5 Guidelines
- Crompton, et al. (2021), “Mapping and Vetting: Converting TEI to Linked Data” [PowerPoint]
- Crompton (2022) “What the Computer Doesn’t Know: Representing Primary Source Documents in TEI” [PowerPoint]
- Text Encoding Initiative (2022) “Projects Using the TEI”