The text encoding in collections like these emphasizes features that will be of immediate, general use for searching and retrieval: information such as bibliographic data, basic text structure, and metadata such as subject keywords to help users find materials of interest. Collections of this type provide access to large quantities of textual material, often focusing on rare or fragile materials which would otherwise be inaccessible. What is it used for?įor sheer quantity, the predominant use of the TEI Guidelines is in creating large digital library collections, such as those being developed at the University of Michigan's Humanities Text Initiative (for example, the American Verse Project), or the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. Because the TEI itself is complex, the customization process is not entirely trivial, but it is designed to be as straightforward as possible. 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. Unlike many standardization efforts, the TEI addresses these and similar questions by explicitly accommodating variation and debate within its technical framework.

How can the many disciplines and communities within the humanities domain find common ground in a single encoding language? How do we agree on the level of detail that is necessary or appropriate in describing our textual materials? How do we reconcile the advantages to be gained by consistency and agreement with the need for individual specialization? How do we handle the truly idiosyncratic and unexpected? Like many standardization efforts, the TEI faces the challenges inherent in such a project. it is a community of projects and individuals who use the TEI Guidelines.it is an international consortium that exists to support this standards development work.it is a standards organization that maintains and develops an XML encoding language for encoding humanities texts.it is a set of guidelines for encoding humanities texts using XML, the eXtensible Markup Language.

In practical terms, it is several things: It proposes a community standard for representing digital texts in a way that is both powerful and responsive to the research needs of humanities scholars. The Text Encoding Initiative is an attempt to prevent the digital equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

Online text encoding