To fulfill the first goal, all you need is something that's platform independent, human-readable: XML for instancedoesn't matter how detailed, what kind of markup

To fulfill the second goal, you need more than this: you need an adequately detailed markup system: a system that can capture the kind of information you are interested in, and enable the kinds of things you plan to do with your data in the future: in other words, make it worth your while to store information in the long term

To fulfill the third goal, you need more than this: you need a markup system that is shared by other people, who agree to use it in the same way you dofor this, you need some sort of infrastructure for developing and maintaining the markup system and even more importantly its documentation, so that people who want to use it have a place to go find it, learn about it.you might be able to come up with a perfectly good encoding system all by yourself; if you lived on a desert island, you wouldn't have any motive to do otherwisebut insofar as text encoding is a community-oriented activity, inventing your own system from scratch can be a very solipsistic activity

This is why the TEI exists: because in order to share information usefully, you need something that functions like a standard.

Descriptive markup, broadly speaking, is about representing a source: it looks backward to an original document or it may express an original, digital idea but either way, it is describing structures and ideas

Whereas procedural markup is about giving orders: It specifies some output, some result It always looks ahead to output, never back to a source

There's clearly a continuum here: from purely procedural approaches on the one hand (in which the only thing we care about is giving instructions concerning output) to purely descriptive approaches on the other (in which the only thing we care about is the representation of the source

In accomplishing that representation we may or may not be interested in how the source looked: descriptive approaches may focus on structure or on presentation or both

This began as one of the primary tenets of SGML encoding: that instead of trying to describe what documents look like, it's more powerful and efficient to describe their structure, and then control appearance afterwards.

Several underlying assumptions here:that the relationship between structure and presentation is consistent (even if perhaps complex)that presentation is not decorative but functional: that is, that it exists to express function, not for any other purposethat presentation is variable while structure is constant (in other words, the structure expresses something fundamental about the document while presentation expresses something secondary)

These assumptions are pretty much true for the kinds of information which were first motivating the development of SGML: for instance, technical documentation, legal forms, documents generated and used by the military and the IRS, all of which needed to be encoded not for immediate output, but for long-term storage, maintenance, and output in multiple formats (including formats that couldn't be foreseen).

And in cases where they are true, there are obvious practical benefits to separating presentation and structure, which are probably either familiar or self-evident or botheven in Microsoft Word, you see the attempt being made (e.g. styles)lets you use the same underlying data with multiple presentationsallows you to change presentation easily through stylesheets, etc.

There are also conceptual benefits, once you move beyond these kinds of prosaic organizational information and start to consider humanities textsif you mark up the structure, you can treat it as an object of analysis: literary analysis, historical analysis, rhetorical analysis, linguistic analysis, etc.

So encoding systems like the TEI (and EAD, DocBook, EpiDoc, etc.) all emphasize structural markup that identifies the parts of the document by their structure rather than their appearance, and even a brain-dead renegade like HTML has been steadily moving from its initial emphasis on presentation (the i and font elements, etc.) to greater structural expressiveness, precisely because it turns out this is a more sustainable, cost-effective way of doing things. QED.

However, if we reexamine those earlier assumptions in light of this new humanities emphasis, they appear much more problematic:the relationship between structure and presentation may not be consistent at all, particularly when dealing with older textseither by accident/sloppiness/practical constraints (such as the need to fit more or less onto a given page: think of the setting of Shakespearean plays as prose or verse depending on available space)or because in fact presentation in humanities texts may well be decorative rather than (or in addition to being) functional: it may exist to comment on, complexify, ironize, adorn, or distract from the contentand further, there has been an important line of commentary within editorial theory and text encoding theory both, arguing that the distinction between an "essential/fundamental" content and a variable/inessential presentation is false: that in fact the presentation and the physical substance of the document are constitutive of meaning and inseparable from it.

And not to mention the fact that even if one regards presentation as secondary, for humanities scholars it turns out to be a very important secondary indeed: they still want to know about how the document looked.

We’re going to talk about renditional markup a bit later on; for the moment, we want to sketch out the issue so that you can be aware of it as we proceed.

Central issues of humanities computing: understanding the intersection between technology and humanistic/cultural research

Important to present this not as a simple act of copying, making a digital facsimile:instead, think of it as part of the intellectual strategy of researchcreating research objects that are of value: whether broad or specific, advanced or basic

Text encoding fits into this as the chief means of creating textual representations: reseach objects which are of interest because of their textual information not simply the letters and words themselves, but also the text’s structure and its contentstext encoding allows the researcher to represent the text in complex waysand allows the addition of specialized research knowledge as well as basic information necessary to elucidate arcane texts.

As a result, text encoding:creates a model of the text: a representation that will be used for research purposesis a strategic act: it exists to serve the specific purposes of its user. It is not a neutral or objective processis thus discipline-specific: it adds certain kinds of information and focuses attention on certain kinds of information, and it ignores and eliminates other kinds of information.

These considerations make text encoding more difficult, but also more interesting, both to learn and to perform.

More difficult: because it involves complex analysis and decision-makingbecause it involves specialized knowledge of the research objects and the audience

More interesting: because its work is directly implicated in the scholarly research that will be performed on the textand in fact is in some ways inseparable from it.

Technically: The TEI is a standards organization that exists to create, maintain, and disseminate a standard for humanities text encodinga common language for encoding humanities documents of all sorts, typically for research or archival purposesinternationally developed and usedwidely supported and used within the academy, libraries, museums, anywhere people have important humanities data

Organizationally: The TEI is an international consortium whose members are institutions that want the TEI to continue to exist

Socially: The TEI is a community of people and projects who use text encoding in a wide variety of ways, and who communicate with one another about their research and the practical problems associated with it.

The TEI is also, importantly, the set of guidelines and XML specifications that make up the TEI Guidelines.first published in 1990; a major release in 1994 (P3) which was the first version to be widely usedan XML version published in 2001 (P4)the latest version is P5, published last November

It’s important to note that the TEI is not a fixed tag set that is written in stoneit is intended to be customized: both for users to select a subset of the TEI that they really need, and for users to add elements for particular features in their textswe will cover customization mechanisms towards the end of the workshop

The TEI Guidelines are a flexible specification:

Note as well that the TEI's domain is strongly international, both in the kinds of materials it is used for (Tibetan manuscripts, graphical narratives from pre-Columbian Mexico, Near Eastern stone inscriptions) and for the international membership community it intends to serve

TEI documentation is being translated into multiple languages: Chinese French German Japanese Spanish