Text Encoding Initiative

From Brock University's Digital Humanities Compendium

Jump to: navigation, search

A review by Grant Schrama, written for HIST 5V71 in Fall 2011

[edit] Analyzing the Text Encoding Initiative

On its website, the Text Encoding Initiative states that it is “… a consortium which develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form.” This Text Encoding Initiative has been active since 1994, producing and publishing texts from a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences. It has been used by libraries, museums, publishers and scholars for individual research, teaching and preservation of damaged or fragile texts. The initiative is made up of a wide variety of scholars, academic institutions and research projects. Some of these projects include: The Anglo-Saxon Poetry Project, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, British National Corpus, and Early Canada Online. This non-profit organization has made available to the general populace thousands of texts from across the world. The purpose of this short paper is twofold: first to discuss the history of the TEI, its set-up and where it is today. Second, this essay will present the pros and cons of the project itself and why it is significant in the study of humanities today.

The very early stages of the Text Encoding Initiative began in November, 1987, at Vassar College. The Association for Computers in the Humanities organized a meeting to discuss “… existing methods of text encoding…” and to propose an international standard for this type of encoding. The meeting was attended by thirty-two experts from a wide range of disciplines and from a great variety of societies, libraries, archives and academic projects in Europe, North America and Asia. It was established at this meeting that the initiative’s purpose would be to form “… a set of guidelines for the creation and use of electronic texts in the majority of linguistic and literary disciplines.” The work to begin this initiative and establish the guidelines was undertaken by The Association for Computers in the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics. Along with these sponsoring organizations, an Advisory Board of delegates from different professional societies was created and two editors were appointed: Michael Sperberg-McQueen of the University of Illinois and Lou Burnard of Oxford University. By the end of 1989, over fifty scholars were directly taking part in the project. In June 1990, the first draft of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines was published, with revisions and extensions being made from 1990-1993. Throughout these years, multiple humanities-based projects started to use the first draft of the Guidelines, giving feedback and ways to improve the initiative. During this period of initial development, “…comments, corrections, and requests for additions arrived from around the world.” In May, 1994 the first official copy of the Guidelines (labelled “P3”) was published.

In 2011, the Guidelines are in their latest installment (P5) and continue to be revised and expanded. Some aspects of the Guidelines include such basic things as what types of punctuation will be used in the texts and how to portray them in the encoded materials, or complex topics such as “Generating Schemas,” and “Implementing an ODD System.” The TEI is run by a Technical Council who is responsible for “… the development and maintenance of the TEI Guidelines and other TEI systems and resources.” The council suggests, analyzes and eventually implements new features and changes to the TEI and oversees the development of a new version of the guidelines. As of present day, members of the council include Brett Barney (Centre for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska), Kevin Hawkins (Digital Publishing Production, University of Michigan), and Martin Holmes (Humanities Computing and Media Centre, University of Victoria). The Text Encoding Initiative intends to grow and include more academic projects as it progresses into the future, with plans to revise the P5 Guidelines.

There has been a great amount of positive feedback towards the Text Encoding Initiative. According to M. Mylonas and A. Renear, TEI has brought together many “… professions, disciplines, and institutions in many countries…” and thus has helped shape a global community of scholars with varying specialties who can share information with each other. Cummings has stated that text encoding allows these electronic texts to be available to the general public across the world. Texts that were once unavailable or damaged are now able to be studied by a global audience. The Text Encoding Initiative also prevents documents from becoming destroyed or lost. The texts thus do not disappear from time or become physically obsolete: they remain in the online databases for ever. In addition, the Text Encoding Initiative has provided scholars with an alternative method of doing research and gaining access to valuable primary documents. Researchers no longer have to travel to use specific texts, but rather can gain access to them through the TEI. The only criticism that can be mentioned about the TEI project is that it is moving academics away from print publications and the physical copies of documents. They no longer need to gain the physical copy of certain sources, and thus publishers have no use in printing them. If the TEI continues to grow and embrace new projects, the use of publishers and libraries may become obsolete.

As a concluding discussion, this paper will discuss the benefits of the Text Encoding Initiative to a student in post-secondary education. The TEI helps make research faster and easier, as many sources that a typical student would not be able to gain access to are available at their fingertips. A student can go through the TEI website and search for a specific project and document that they need. They no longer need to go to museums or archives to access these sources: a great asset to students who cannot afford such trips or only wish to have a glancing look at a specific document. The TEI also makes available sources that students would never be able to view due to damage and fragility. These “at risk” documents are now preserved online for students and scholars to access when they wish. However, students do not get to experience these primary sources on a firsthand basis, and this loss of actually touching the document can be seen as a drawback. Students who wish to have a physical copy of the text may be unsatisfied with the digitalized version provided by the TEI. As the TEI becomes larger and grows in the number of projects it encompasses, what of publishers and the physical press? Will they become irrelevant and unnecessary as the digitalization of text becomes more prevalent? For students and scholars a like, this question turns more endearing as the digital world increases.

 

[edit] Works Cited

  • Cummings, James. “The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.” In Companion to Digital

Literary Studies, edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, 451-477. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2008.

  • Mylonas, M. and A. Renear. “The Text Encoding Initiative at 10: Not Just an Interchange Format

Anymore- but a New Research Community.” Computers and the Humanities 33 (1999): 1-9. Quoted in Allan Renear. “Text Encoding.” In Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, 218-239. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004.

  • Renear, Allan. “Text Encoding.” In Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray

Siemens and John Unsworth, 218-239. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004.

  • Text Encoding Initiative. “Elements Available in All TEI Documents.” http://www.tei-

c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html.

Retrieved from "https://kumu.brocku.ca/brockdhc/Text_Encoding_Initiative"
Personal tools
Bookmark and Share