teis

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, a collaborative project to develop guidelines for encoding texts in digital form, primarily for humanities scholarship. The TEI Guidelines describe an XML-based markup scheme designed to represent the structural, linguistic, and bibliographic features of texts, enabling consistent storage, interchange, and analysis.

The guidelines are modular and customizable. They define a TEI document structure with a teiHeader for metadata (title, author, publication information, source description) and a text element containing the content divided into divisions and paragraphs, along with specialized elements for names, dates, quotations, notes, apparatus, and linguistic annotation. The guidelines support encoding of manuscript features, variant readings, translations, and critical apparatus, as well as linguistic annotation.

History and governance: The project arose in the late 1980s as a community effort among libraries and research institutions to promote interoperability of digital texts. The TEI Consortium currently maintains the guidelines and fosters a broad community of contributors. Updates are released regularly to reflect evolving scholarly needs and technologies.

Use and impact: TEI is widely used for scholarly editions, digital archives, and corpus projects. It supports interoperability across platforms and long-term preservation. TEI documents can be validated against schemas or DTDs, and customized formats can be created via the ODD (One Document Does It) framework, which produces tailored schemas and documentation. TEI guides and examples are freely available online, and numerous tools exist for encoding, transforming, and analyzing TEI data.

Examples and ecosystem: The TEI framework underpins many digital humanities projects and library initiatives, supported by a broad ecosystem of editors, validators, processors, and community resources.