Before defining TEI, let's first take a look at some TEI code. Here is an example of some TEI that encodes a line of text and indicates a portion that has been struck out.
<line>This is a <del>paragraph</del>line of text</line>
To those who are familiar with it, TEI, at first glance, looks a lot like HTML. Both use a tagging structure that encloses textual elements to indicate something about those elements. However, while HTML encodes how text should appear on a webpage, in the form of titles, headings, paragraphs, or links, TEI encodes the content of the text, in addition to some description about its appearance.
Once a text is marked up with TEI, the relevant elements can be searched, processed, and rendered to facilitate scholarly research.
TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, and it defines a set of guidelines for the encoding of text. In more technical terms:
TEI is a markup schema for representing the structural, renditional, and conceptual features of texts. TEI guidelines are based off XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, and were developed and are currently maintained by an academic collective known as the TEI Consortium.
Let's take apart this definition, bracketing (for now) the references to the TEI-C and XML, which we will discuss later.
Markup Schema:
- markup means annotation or other descriptive marks within a text that instruct a compositor or typist how a particular passage should be printed or laid out. All printed texts are implicitly encoded (or marked up) in the sense of punctuation, capitalization, disposition of letters around the page, even the spaces between words. Markup helps us to see the structure (titles, words, paragraphs) of the text.
- schema indicates a model. Another way to think of it is a set of rules or standards to be followed.
Markup schema, in other words, is a series of marks that indicate how a text ought to be presented on a page or screen---these are the structural and/or renditional aspects of the text. As such, there is an emphasis on appearance and structure, but as you will see, markup also applies elements beyond just display.
Conceptual elements concerns the content of text, its cultural or personal references. When personal, this can refer to the writing entity (either author or editor), or the intended audience, or references to personages within the text. Besides this it can also refer to places, locations, or other content.
Markup therefore describes some aspect of the text by adding additional organizational, visible, or informational elements about that text. These elements range from the more objective, physical traces on the page/screen to the more subjective ideas and assumptions about meaning and references behind the visible elements.
Encoding with TEI also adds the benefit of making the text sustainable and portable. Because the format of the TEI itself is built from a non-invasive markup language (XML), it can be preserved over time and across computer programs, and will outlast more stylized file formats like a Microsoft Word document.
While this makes TEI documents increasingly convenient, it also creates the potential for problems regarding the handling of textual data. As humanists well know, textual data is open to interpretation. However, in order to be useful, the computer (and TEI specifically) imposes a certain level of fixity on textual data. For example, if the gender of the author is unclear or deliberately obscure, the computer will still need a fixed gender identification in order to process that aspect about the text.
Though the strict tagging schema of TEI may inadvertantly encourage encoders to resolve a text’s ambiguity, it does a good job addressing the more fixed and disambiguated textual elements in a way that reflects widespread consensus about these, while opening itself to more complex tasks.
The Women Writers Project, a group of academics who work with TEI to encode women's writing, adequately frames how TEI's inherent extensibility can handle textual ambiguity. According to the WWP:
Unlike many standardization efforts, the TEI ... explicitly accommodat[es] variation and debate within its technical framework. The TEI Guidelines are designed to be both modular and customizable, so that specific projects can choose the relevant portions of the TEI and ignore the rest, and can also if necessary create extensions of the TEI language to describe facets of the text which the TEI does not yet address.”
In other words, TEI is built from a language that allows its users, in turn, to build their own version of that language. As a result, there is potential for representing the elements necessary to a project by customizing these elements on a project-by-project basis.
Though this doesn't solve all issues relating to textual ambiguity, it's a start. In the next section, we are going to look a little bit at XML to get a glimpse of its potential for extensibility.