TEI Lite: Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI Revised for TEI P5 release

This document provides an introduction to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), by describing a specific subset of the full TEI encoding scheme. The scheme documented here can be used to encode a wide variety of commonly encountered textual features, in such a way as to maximize the usability of electronic transcriptions and to facilitate their interchange among scholars using different computer systems. It is fully compatible with the full TEI scheme, as defined by TEI document P5, Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, as of February 2006, and available from the TEI Consortium website at http://www.tei-c.org.

1 Introduction

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines are addressed to anyone who wants to interchange information stored in an electronic form. They emphasize the interchange of textual information, but other forms of information such as images and sound are also addressed. The Guidelines are equally applicable in the creation of new resources and in the interchange of existing ones.

The Guidelines provide a means of making explicit certain features of a text in such a way as to aid the processing of that text by computer programs running on different machines. This process of making explicit we call markup or encoding. Any textual representation on a computer uses some form of markup; the TEI came into being partly because of the enormous variety of mutually incomprehensible encoding schemes currently besetting scholarship, and partly because of the expanding range of scholarly uses now being identified for texts in electronic form.

The TEI Guidelines describe an encoding scheme which can be expressed using a number of different formal languages. The first editions of the Guidelines used the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML); since 2002, this has been replaced by the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). These markup languages have in common the definition of text in terms of elements and attributes, and rules governing their appearance within a text. The TEI's use of XML is ambitious in its complexity and generality, but it is fundamentally no different from that of any other XML markup scheme, and so any general-purpose XML-aware software is able to process TEI-conformant texts.

The TEI was sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and is now maintained and developed by an independent membership consortium, hosted by four major Universities. Funding has been provided in part from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Communities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Guidelines were first published in May 1994, after six years of development involving many hundreds of scholars from different academic disciplines worldwide. During the years that followed, the Guidelines were increasingly influential in the development of the digital library, in the language industries, and even in the development of the World Wide Web itself. The TEI consortium was set up in January 2001, and a year later produced an edition of the Guidelines entirely revised for XML compatibility. In 2004, it set about a major revision of the Guidelines to take full advantage of new schema languages, the first release of which appeared in 2005. This revision of the TEI Lite manual conforms to version 0.3 of this most recent edition of the Guidelines, TEI P5.

At the outset of its work, the overall goals of the TEI were defined by the closing statement of a planning conference held at Vassar College, N.Y., in November, 1987; these ‘Poughkeepsie Principles’ were further elaborated in a series of design documents. The Guidelines, say these design documents, should:

suffice to represent the textual features needed for research;
be simple, clear, and concrete;
be easy for researchers to use without special-purpose software;
allow the rigorous definition and efficient processing of texts;
provide for user-defined extensions;
conform to existing and emergent standards.

The world of scholarship is large and diverse. For the Guidelines to have wide acceptability, it was important to ensure that:

the common core of textual features be easily shared;
additional specialist features be easy to add to (or remove from) a text;
multiple parallel encodings of the same feature should be possible;
the richness of markup should be user-defined, with a very small minimal requirement;
adequate documentation of the text and its encoding should be provided.

The present document describes a manageable selection from the extensive set of elements and recommendations resulting from those design goals, which is called TEI Lite.

In selecting from the several hundred elements defined by the full TEI scheme, we have tried to identify a useful ‘starter set’, comprising the elements which almost every user should know about. Experience working with TEI Lite will be invaluable in understanding the full TEI scheme and in knowing how to integrate specialized parts of it into the general TEI framework.

Our goals in defining this subset may be summarized as follows:

it should be able to handle adequately a reasonably wide variety of texts, at the level of detail found in existing practice (as demonstrated in, for example, the holdings of the Oxford Text Archive);
it should be useful for the production of new documents (such as this one) as well as the encoding of existing texts;
it should be usable with a wide range of existing XML software;
it should be derivable from the full TEI scheme using the extension mechanisms described in the TEI Guidelines;
it should be as small and simple as is consistent with the other goals.

The reader may judge our success in meeting these goals for him or herself. At the time of first writing (1995), our confidence that we have at least partially done so is borne out by its use in practice for the encoding of real texts. The Oxford Text Archive uses TEI Lite when it translates texts from its holdings from their original markup schemes into SGML; the Electronic Text Centers at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan have used TEI Lite to encode their holdings. And the Text Encoding Initiative itself uses TEI Lite, in its current technical documentation — including this document.

Although we have tried to make this document self-contained, as suits a tutorial text, the reader should be aware that it does not cover every detail of the TEI encoding scheme. All of the elements described here are fully documented in the TEI Guidelines themselves, which should be consulted for authoritative reference information on these, and on the many others which are not described here. Some basic knowledge of XML is assumed.

2 A Short Example

We begin with a short example, intended to show what happens when a passage of prose is typed into a computer by someone with little sense of the purpose of mark-up, or the potential of electronic texts. In an ideal world, such output might be generated by a very accurate optical scanner. It attempts to be faithful to the appearance of the printed text, by retaining the original line breaks, by introducing blanks to represent the layout of the original headings and page breaks, and so forth. Where characters not available on the keyboard are needed (such as the accented letter a in faàl or the long dash), it attempts to mimic their appearance.

CHAPTER 38 READER, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the par- son and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the knives, and I said -- 'Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning.' The housekeeper and her husband were of that decent, phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me; the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air, and for the same space of time John's knives also had rest from the polishing process; but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only -- 'Have you, miss? Well, for sure!' A short time after she pursued, 'I seed you go out with the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed'; and she basted away. John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear. 'I telled Mary how it would be,' he said: 'I knew what Mr Ed- ward' (John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet of the house, therefore he often gave him his Christian name) -- 'I knew what Mr Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long either: and he's done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, miss!' and he politely pulled his forelock. 'Thank you, John. Mr Rochester told me to give you and Mary this.' I put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the words -- 'She'll happen do better for him nor ony o' t' grand ladies.' And again, 'If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faa\l, and varry good-natured; and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see that.' I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and 474 JANE EYRE 475 Mary approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see me. 'She had better not wait till then, Jane,' said Mr Rochester, when I read her letter to him; 'if she does, she will be too late, for our honey- moon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.' How St John received the news I don't know: he never answered the letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr Rochester's name or allud- ing to my marriage. His letter was then calm, and though very serious, kind. He has maintained a regular, though not very frequent correspond- ence ever since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in the world, and only mind earthly things.

This transcription suffers from a number of shortcomings:

the page numbers and running titles are intermingled with the text in a way which makes it difficult for software to disentangle them;
no distinction is made between single quotation marks and apostrophe, so it is difficult to know exactly which passages are in direct speech;
the preservation of the copy text's hyphenation means that simple-minded search programs will not find the broken words;
the accented letter in faàl and the long dash have been rendered by ad hoc keying conventions which follow no standard pattern and will be processed correctly only if the transcriber remembers to mention them in the documentation;
paragraph divisions are marked only by the use of white space, and hard carriage returns have been introduced at the end of each line. Consequently, if the size of type used to print the text changes, reformatting will be problematic.

We now present the same passage, as it might be encoded using the TEI Guidelines. As we shall see, there are many ways in which this encoding could be extended, but as a minimum, the TEI approach allows us to represent the following distinctions:

Paragraph and chapter divisions are now marked explicitly.
Apostrophes are distinguished from quotation marks; direct speech is explicitly marked.
The accented letter and the long dash are correctly represented.
Page divisions have been marked with an empty <pb> element alone.
The lineation of the original has not been retained and words broken by typographic accident at the end of a line have been re-assembled without comment.
For convenience of proof reading, a new line has been introduced at the start of each paragraph, but the indentation is removed.

<pb n="474"/>
<div type="chapter" n="38">
<p>Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I,
   the parson and clerk, were alone present. When we got back
   from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house,
   where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the
   knives, and I said —</p>
<p>
  <q>Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this
     morning.</q> The housekeeper and her husband were of that
   decent, phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any
   time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without
   incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some
   shrill ejaculation and subsequently stunned by a torrent of
   wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at
   me; the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens
   roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang
   suspended in air, and for the same space of time John's
   knives also had rest from the polishing process; but Mary,
   bending again over the roast, said only —</p>
<p>
  <q>Have you, miss? Well, for sure!</q>
</p>
<p>A short time after she pursued, <q>I seed you go out with
     the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be
     wed</q>; and she basted away. John, when I turned to him,
   was grinning from ear to ear. <q>I telled Mary how it would
     be,</q> he said: <q>I knew what Mr Edward</q> (John was an
   old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet
   of the house, therefore he often gave him his Christian
   name) — <q>I knew what Mr Edward would do; and I was
     certain he would not wait long either: and he's done right,
     for aught I know. I wish you joy, miss!</q> and he politely
   pulled his forelock.</p>
<p>
  <q>Thank you, John. Mr Rochester told me to give you and
     Mary this.</q>
</p>
<p>I put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting
   to hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of
   that sanctum some time after, I caught the words —</p>
<p>
  <q>She'll happen do better for him nor ony o' t' grand
     ladies.</q> And again, <q>If she ben't one o' th'
     handsomest, she's noan faàl, and varry good-natured;
     and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see
     that.</q>
</p>
<p>I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to
   say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus
   acted. Diana and <pb n="475"/> Mary approved the step
   unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me
   time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and
   see me.</p>
<p>
  <q>She had better not wait till then, Jane,</q> said Mr
   Rochester, when I read her letter to him; <q>if she does,
     she will be too late, for our honeymoon will shine our life
     long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.</q>
</p>
<p>How St John received the news I don't know: he never
   answered the letter in which I communicated it: yet six
   months after he wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr
   Rochester's name or alluding to my marriage. His letter was
   then calm, and though very serious, kind. He has maintained
   a regular, though not very frequent correspondence ever
   since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who
   live without God in the world, and only mind earthly things.</p>
</div>

This particular encoding represents a set of choices or priorities. The decision to focus on Brontë's text, rather than on the printing of it in this particular edition, is an instance of the fundamental selectivity of any encoding. An encoding makes explicit only those textual features of importance to the encoder. It is not difficult to think of ways in which the encoding of even this short passage might readily be extended. For example:

a regularized form of the passages in dialect could be provided;
footnotes glossing or commenting on any passage could be added;
pointers linking parts of this text to others could be added;
proper names of various kinds could be distinguished from the surrounding text;
detailed bibliographic information about the text's provenance and context could be prefixed to it;
a linguistic analysis of the passage into sentences, clauses, words, etc., could be provided, each unit being associated with appropriate category codes;
the text could be segmented into narrative or discourse units;
systematic analysis or interpretation of the text could be included in the encoding, with potentially complex alignment or linkage between the text and the analysis, or between the text and one or more translations of it;
passages in the text could be linked to images or sound held on other media.

A TEI-recommended way of carrying out most of these is described in the remainder of this document. The TEI scheme as a whole also provides for an enormous range of other possibilities, of which we cite only a few:

detailed analysis of the components of names;
detailed meta-information providing thesaurus-style information about the text's origins or topics;
information about the printing history or manuscript variations exhibited by a particular series of versions of the text.

For recommendations on these and many other possibilities, the full Guidelines should be consulted.

3 The Structure of a TEI Text

All TEI-conformant texts contain (a) a TEI header (marked up as a <teiHeader> element) and (b) the transcription of the text proper (marked up as a <text> element). These two elements are combined together to form a single <TEI> element.

The TEI header provides information analogous to that provided by the title page of a printed text. It has up to four parts: a bibliographic description of the machine-readable text, a description of the way it has been encoded, a non-bibliographic description of the text (a text profile), and a revision history. The header is described in more detail in section 19 The Electronic Title Page.

A TEI text may be unitary (a single work) or composite (a collection of single works, such as an anthology). In either case, the text may have an optional front or back. In between is the body of the text, which, in the case of a composite text, may consist of groups, each containing more groups or texts.

A unitary text will be encoded using an overall structure like this:

A composite text also has an optional front and back. In between occur one or more groups of texts, each with its own optional front and back matter. A composite text will thus be encoded using an overall structure like this:

It is also possible to define a composite of TEI texts, each with its own header. Such a collection is known as a TEI corpus, and may itself have a header:

It is not however possible to create a composite of corpora -- that is, a number of <teiCorpus> elements combined together and treated as a single object. This is a restriction of the current version of the TEI Guidelines.

In the remainder of this document, we discuss chiefly simple text structures. The discussion in each case consists of a short list of relevant TEI elements with a brief definition of each, followed by definitions for any attributes specific to that element, and a reference to any classes of which the element is a member. These references are linked to full specifications for each object, as given in the TEI Guidelines. In most cases, short examples are also given.

For example, here are the elements discussed so far:

TEI (TEI document) contains a single TEI-conformant document, comprising a TEI header and a text, either in isolation or as part of a <teiCorpus> element.
teiHeader (TEI Header) supplies the descriptive and declarative information making up an electronic title page prefixed to every TEI-conformant text.
text contains a single text of any kind, whether unitary or composite, for example a poem or drama, a collection of essays, a novel, a dictionary, or a corpus sample.

4 Encoding the Body

As indicated above, a simple TEI document at the textual level consists of the following elements:

front (front matter) contains any prefatory matter (headers, title page, prefaces, dedications, etc.) found at the start of a document, before the main body.
group contains the body of a composite text, grouping together a sequence of distinct texts (or groups of such texts) which are regarded as a unit for some purpose, for example the collected works of an author, a sequence of prose essays, etc.
body (text body) contains the whole body of a single unitary text, excluding any front or back matter.
back (back matter) contains any appendixes, etc. following the main part of a text.

Elements specific to front and back matter are described below in section 18 Front and Back Matter. In this section we discuss the elements making up the body of a text.

4.1 Text Division Elements

The body of a prose text may be just a series of paragraphs, or these paragraphs may be grouped together into chapters, sections, subsections, etc. Each paragraph is tagged using the <p> tag. The <div> element is used to represent any such grouping of paragraphs.

p (paragraph) marks paragraphs in prose.
div (text division) contains a subdivision of the front, body, or back of a text.

The type attribute on the <div> element may be used to supply a conventional name for this category of text division, or otherwise distinguish them. Typical values might be ‘book’, ‘chapter’, ‘section’, ‘part’, ‘poem’, ‘song’, etc. For a given project, it will usually be advisable to define and adhere to a specific list of such values.

A <div> element may itself contain further, nested, <div>s, thus mimicking the traditional structure of a book, which can be decomposed hierarchically into units such as parts, containing chapters, containing sections, and so on. TEI texts in general conform to this simple hierarchic model.

The xml:id attribute may be used to supply a unique identifier for the division, which may be used for cross references or other links to it, such as a commentary, as further discussed in section 8 Cross References and Links. It is often useful to provide an xml:id attribute for every major structural unit in a text, and to derive its values in some systematic way, for example by appending a section number to a short code for the title of the work in question, as in the examples below.

The n attribute may be used to supply (additionally or alternatively) a short mnemonic name or number for the division. If a conventional form of reference or abbreviation for the parts of a work already exists (such as the book/chapter/verse pattern of Biblical citations), the n attribute is the place to record it.

The xml:lang attribute may be used to specify the language of the division. Languages are identified by an internationally defined code, as further discussed in section 6.3 Foreign Words or Expressions below.

The rend attribute may be used to supply information about the rendition (appearance) of a division, or any other element, as further discussed in section 6 Marking Highlighted Phrases below. As with the type attribute, a project will often find it useful to predefine the possible values for this attribute, but TEI Lite does not constrain it in anyway.

These four attributes, xml:id, n, xml:lang, and rend are so widely useful that they are allowed on any element in any TEI schema: they are global attributes. Other global attributes defined in the TEI Lite scheme are discussed in section 8.3 Special kinds of Linking.

The value of every xml:id attribute should be unique within a document. One simple way of ensuring that this is so is to make it reflect the hierarchic structure of the document. For example, Smith's Wealth of Nations as first published consists of five books, each of which is divided into chapters, while some chapters are further subdivided into parts. We might define xml:id values for this structure as follows:

A different numbering scheme may be used for xml:id and n attributes: this is often useful where a canonical reference scheme is used which does not tally with the structure of the work. For example, in a novel divided into books each containing chapters, where the chapters are numbered sequentially through the whole work, rather than within each book, one might use a scheme such as the following:

Here the work has two volumes, each containing two chapters. The chapters are numbered conventionally 1 to 4, but the xml:id values specified allow them to be regarded additionally as if they were numbered 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2.

4.2 Headings and Closings

Every <div> may have a title or heading at its start, and (less commonly) a closing such as ‘End of Chapter 1’. The following elements may be used to transcribe them:

head (heading) contains any type of heading, for example the title of a section, or the heading of a list, glossary, manuscript description, etc.
trailer contains a closing title or footer appearing at the end of a division of a text.

Some other elements which may be necessary at the beginning or ending of text divisions are discussed below in section 18.1.2 Prefatory Matter.

Whether or not headings and trailers are included in a transcription is a matter for the individual transcriber to decide. Where a heading is completely regular (for example ‘Chapter 1’) or may be automatically constructed from attribute values (e.g. <div type="Chapter" n="1">), it may be omitted; where it contains otherwise unrecoverable text it should always be included. For example, the start of Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree might be encoded as follows:

<div xml:id="UGT1" n="Winter" type="Part">
<div xml:id="UGT11" n="1" type="Chapter">
  <head>Mellstock-Lane</head>
  <p>To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree ...
  </p>
</div>
</div>

4.3 Prose, Verse and Drama

As noted above, the paragraphs making up a textual division should be tagged with the <p> tag. For example:

<p>I fully appreciate Gen. Pope's splendid achievements
with their invaluable results; but you must know that
Major Generalships in the Regular Army, are not as
plenty as blackberries.
</p>

A number of different tags are provided for the encoding of the structural components of verse and performance texts (drama, film, etc.):

l (verse line) contains a single, possibly incomplete, line of verse.
lg (line group) contains a group of verse lines functioning as a formal unit, e.g. a stanza, refrain, verse paragraph, etc.
sp (speech) An individual speech in a performance text, or a passage presented as such in a prose or verse text.
speaker A specialized form of heading or label, giving the name of one or more speakers in a dramatic text or fragment.
stage (stage direction) contains any kind of stage direction within a dramatic text or fragment.

Here, for example, is the start of a poetic text in which verse lines and stanzas are tagged:

<lg n="I">
<l>I Sing the progresse of a
   deathlesse soule,</l>
<l>Whom Fate, with God made,
   but doth not controule,</l>
<l>Plac'd in most shapes; all times
   before the law</l>
<l>Yoak'd us, and when, and since,
   in this I sing.</l>
<l>And the great world to his aged evening;</l>
<l>From infant morne, through manly noone I draw.</l>
<l>What the gold Chaldee, of silver Persian saw,</l>
<l>Greeke brass, or Roman iron, is in this one;</l>
<l>A worke t'out weare Seths pillars, bricke and stone,</l>
<l>And (holy writs excepted) made to yeeld to none,</l>
</lg>

Note that the <l> element marks verse lines, not typographic lines: the original lineation of the first few lines above has not therefore been made explicit by this encoding, and may be lost. The <lb> element described in section 5 Page and Line Numbers may be used to mark typographic lines if so desired.

Sometimes, particularly in dramatic texts, verse lines are split between speakers. The easiest way of encoding this is to use the part attribute to indicate that the lines so fragmented are incomplete, as in this example:

<div type="Act" n="I">
<head>ACT I</head>
<div type="Scene" n="1">
  <head>SCENE I</head>
  <stage rend="italic">Enter Barnardo and Francisco, two Sentinels, at several doors</stage>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Barn</speaker>
   <l part="Y">Who's there?</l>
  </sp>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Fran</speaker>
   <l>Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold
       yourself.</l>
  </sp>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Barn</speaker>
   <l part="I">Long live the King!</l>
  </sp>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Fran</speaker>
   <l part="M">Barnardo?</l>
  </sp>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Barn</speaker>
   <l part="F">He.</l>
  </sp>
  <sp>
   <speaker>Fran</speaker>
   <l>You come most carefully upon
       your hour.</l>
  </sp>

</div>
</div>

The same mechanism may be applied to stanzas which are divided between two speakers:

<div>
<sp>
  <speaker>First voice</speaker>
  <lg type="stanza" part="I">
   <l>But why drives on that ship so fast</l>
   <l>Withouten wave or wind?</l>
  </lg>
</sp>
<sp>
  <speaker>Second Voice</speaker>
  <lg part="F">
   <l>The air is cut away before.</l>
   <l>And closes from behind.</l>
  </lg>
</sp>

</div>

This example shows how dialogue presented in a prose work as if it were drama should be encoded. It also demonstrates the use of the who attribute to bear a code identifying the speaker of the piece of dialogue concerned:

<div>
<sp who="OPI">
  <speaker>The reverend Doctor Opimiam</speaker>
  <p>I do not think I have named a single unpresentable fish.</p>
</sp>
<sp who="GRM">
  <speaker>Mr Gryll</speaker>
  <p>Bream, Doctor: there is not much to be said for bream.</p>
</sp>
<sp who="OPI">
  <speaker>The Reverend Doctor Opimiam</speaker>
  <p>On the contrary, sir, I think there is much to be said for him.
     In the first place....</p>
  <p>Fish, Miss Gryll -- I could discourse to you on fish by
     the hour: but for the present I will forbear.</p>
</sp>
</div>

5 Page and Line Numbers

Page and line breaks may be marked with the following empty elements.

pb/ (page break) marks the boundary between one page of a text and the next in a standard reference system.
lb/ (line break) marks the start of a new (typographic) line in some edition or version of a text.
milestone/ marks a boundary point separating any kind of section of a text, as indicated by changes in a standard reference system, where the section is not represented by a structural element.

These elements mark a single point in the text, not a span of text. The global n attribute should be used to supply the number of the page or line beginning at the tag.

When working from a paginated original, it is often useful to record its pagination, if only to simplify later proof-reading. Recording the line breaks may be useful for the same reason; treatment of end-of-line hyphenation in printed source texts will require some consideration.

If pagination, etc., are marked for more than one edition, specify the edition in question using the ed attribute, and supply as many tags are necessary. For example, in the following passage we indicate where the page breaks occur in two different editions (ED1 and ED2)

<p>I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to
say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus
acted. Diana and <pb ed="ED1" n="475"/> Mary approved the
step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would
<pb ed="ED2" n="485"/>just give me time to get over the
honeymoon, and then she would come and see me.</p>

The <pb> and <lb> elements are special cases of the general class of milestone elements which mark reference points within a text. TEI Lite also includes a generic <milestone> element, which is not restricted to special cases but can mark any kind of reference point: for example, a column break, the start of a new kind of section not otherwise tagged, or in general any significant change in the text not marked by an XML element. The names used for types of unit and for editions referred to by the ed and unit attributes may be chosen freely, but should be documented in the header. The <milestone> element may be used to replace the others, or the others may be used as a set; they should not be mixed arbitrarily.

6 Marking Highlighted Phrases

6.1 Changes of Typeface, etc.

Highlighted words or phrases are those made visibly different from the rest of the text, typically by a change of type font, handwriting style, ink colour etc., which is intended to draw the reader's attention to some associated change.

The global rend attribute can be attached to any element, and used wherever necessary to specify details of the highlighting used for it. For example, a heading rendered in bold might be tagged <head rend="bold">, and one in italic <head rend="italic">.

It is not always possible or desirable to interpret the reasons for such changes of rendering in a text. In such cases, the element <hi> may be used to mark a sequence of highlighted text without making any claim as to its status.

hi (highlighted) marks a word or phrase as graphically distinct from the surrounding text, for reasons concerning which no claim is made.

In the following example, the use of a distinct typeface for the subheading and for the included name are recorded but not interpreted:

<p>
<hi rend="gothic">And this Indenture further witnesseth</hi>
that the said <hi rend="italic">Walter Shandy</hi>, merchant,
in consideration of the said intended marriage ...
</p>

Alternatively, where the cause for the highlighting can be identified with confidence, a number of other, more specific, elements are available.

emph (emphasized) marks words or phrases which are stressed or emphasized for linguistic or rhetorical effect.
foreign (foreign) identifies a word or phrase as belonging to some language other than that of the surrounding text.
gloss identifies a phrase or word used to provide a gloss or definition for some other word or phrase.
label contains the label associated with an item in a list; in glossaries, marks the term being defined.
mentioned marks words or phrases mentioned, not used.
term contains a single-word, multi-word, or symbolic designation which is regarded as a technical term.
title contains the full title of a work of any kind.

Some features (notably quotations and glosses) may be found in a text either marked by highlighting, or with quotation marks. In either case, the elements <q> and <gloss> (as discussed in the following section) should be used. If the rendition is to be recorded, use the global rend attribute.

As an example of the elements defined here, consider the following sentence:

On the one hand the Nibelungenlied is associated with the new rise of romance of twelfth-century France, the romans d'antiquité, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and the German adaptations of these works by Heinrich van Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Interpreting the role of the highlighting, the sentence might look like this:

<p>On the one hand the <title>Nibelungenlied</title> is associated
with the new rise of romance of twelfth-century France, the
<foreign>romans d'antiquité</foreign>, the romances of
Chrétien de Troyes, ...</p>

Describing only the appearance of the original, it might look like this:

<p>On the one hand the <hi rend="italic">Nibelungenlied</hi>
is associated with the new rise of romance of twelfth-century
France, the <hi rend="italic">romans
d'antiquité</hi>, the romances of
Chrétien de Troyes, ...</p>

6.2 Quotations and Related Features

Like changes of typeface, quotation marks are conventionally used to denote several different features within a text, of which the most frequent is quotation. When possible, we recommend that the underlying feature be tagged, rather than the simple fact that quotation marks appear in the text, using the following elements:

q (separated from the surrounding text with quotation marks) contains material which is marked as (ostensibly) being somehow different than the surrounding text, for any one of a variety of reasons including, but not limited to: direct speech or thought, technical terms or jargon, authorial distance, quotations from elsewhere, and passages that are mentioned but not used.
quote (quotation) contains a phrase or passage attributed by the narrator or author to some agency external to the text.
mentioned marks words or phrases mentioned, not used.
soCalled contains a word or phrase for which the author or narrator indicates a disclaiming of responsibility, for example by the use of scare quotes or italics.
gloss identifies a phrase or word used to provide a gloss or definition for some other word or phrase.

Here is a simple example of a quotation:

<p>Few dictionary makers are likely to forget
Dr. Johnson's description of the
lexicographer as <q>a harmless drudge.</q>
</p>

To record how a quotation was printed (for example, in-line or set off as a display or block quotation), the rend attribute should be used. This may also be used to indicate the kind of quotation marks used.

Direct speech interrupted by a narrator can be represented simply by ending the quotation and beginning it again after the interruption, as in the following example:

<p>
<q>Who-e debel you?</q> — he at last said — <q>you
no speak-e, damme, I kill-e.</q> And so saying, the lighted
tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
</p>

If it is important to convey the idea that the two <q> elements together make up a single speech, the linking attributes next and prev may be used, as described in section 8.3 Special kinds of Linking.

Quotations may be accompanied by a reference to the source or speaker, using the who attribute, whether or not the source is given in the text, as in the following example:

<q who="Wilson">Spaulding, he came down into the office just this
day eight weeks with this very paper in his hand, and he
says:—<q who="Spaulding">I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that
I was a red-headed man.</q>
</q>

This example also demonstrates how quotations may be embedded within other quotations: one speaker (Wilson) quotes another speaker (Spaulding).

The creator of the electronic text must decide whether quotation marks are replaced by the tags or whether the tags are added and the quotation marks kept. If the quotation marks are removed from the text, the rend attribute may be used to record the way in which they were rendered in the copy text.

As with highlighting, it is not always possible and may not be considered desirable to interpret the function of quotation marks in a text in this way. In such cases, the tag <hi rend="quoted"> might be used to mark quoted text without making any claim as to its status.

6.3 Foreign Words or Expressions

Words or phrases which are not in the main language of the texts may be tagged as such in one of two ways. If the word or phrase is already tagged for some reason, the element indicated should bear a value for the global xml:lang attribute indicating the language used. Where there is no applicable element, the element <foreign> may be used, again using the xml:lang attribute. For example:

<p>John has real
<foreign xml:lang="fra">savoir-faire</foreign>.</p>
<p>Have you read <title xml:lang="deu">Die Dreigroschenoper</title>?</p>
<p>
<mentioned xml:lang="fra">Savoir-faire</mentioned> is French for
know-how.
</p>
<p>The court issued a writ of <term xml:lang="lat">mandamus</term>.</p>

As these examples show, the <foreign> element should not be used to tag foreign words if some other more specific element such as <title>, <mentioned>, or <term> applies. The global xml:lang attribute may be attached to any element to show that it uses some other language than that of the surrounding text.

The codes used to identify languages, supplied on the xml:lang attribute, must be constructed in a particular way, and must conform to common Internet standards¹, as further explained in the relevant section of the TEI Guidelines. Some simple example codes for a few languages are given here:

zh or zho	Chinese	grc	Ancient Greek
en	English	ell or el	Greek
enm	Middle English	ja or jpn	Japanese
fr or fra	French	la or lat	Latin
de or deu	German	sa or san	Sanskrit

7 Notes

All notes, whether printed as footnotes, endnotes, marginalia, or elsewhere, should be marked using the same element:

note contains a note or annotation.

Where possible, the body of a note should be inserted in the text at the point at which its identifier or mark first appears. This may not be possible for example with marginalia, which may not be anchored to an exact location. For simplicity, it may be adequate to position marginal notes before the relevant paragraph or other element. Notes may also be placed in a separate division of the text (as end-notes are, in printed books) and linked to the relevant portion of the text using their target attribute.

The n attribute may be used to supply the number or identifier of a note if this is required. The resp attribute should be used consistently to distinguish between authorial and editorial notes, if the work has both kinds; otherwise, the TEI header should state which kind they are.

Examples:

<p>Collections are ensembles of distinct
entities or objects of any sort.
<note place="foot" n="1">We explain below why we use the uncommon term
<mentioned>collection</mentioned>
   instead of the expected <mentioned>set</mentioned>.
   Our usage corresponds to the <mentioned>aggregate</mentioned>
   of many mathematical writings and to the sense of
<mentioned>class</mentioned> found
   in older logical writings.
</note>
The elements ...</p>

<lg xml:id="RAM609">
<note place="margin">The curse is finally expiated</note>
<l>And now this spell was snapt: once more</l>
<l>I viewed the ocean green,</l>
<l>And looked far forth, yet little saw</l>
<l>Of what had else been seen —</l>
</lg>

8 Cross References and Links

Explicit cross references or links from one point in a text to another in the same or another document may be encoded using the elements described in this section. Implicit links (such as the association between two parallel texts, or that between a text and its interpretation) may be encoded using the linking attributes discussed in section 8.3 Special kinds of Linking.

8.1 Simple Cross References

A cross reference from one point within a single document to another can be encoded using either of the following elements:

ref (reference) defines a reference to another location, possibly modified by additional text or comment.
ptr/ (pointer) defines a pointer to another location.

The difference between these two elements is that <ptr> is an empty element, simply marking a point from which a link is to be made, whereas <ref> may contain some text as well — typically the text of the cross-reference itself. The <ptr> element would be used for a cross reference which is to be indicated by some non-verbal means such as a symbol or icon, or in an electronic text by a button. It is also useful in document production systems, where the formatter can generate the correct verbal form of the cross reference.

The following two forms, for example, are logically equivalent (assuming we have documented somewhere the exact verbal form of cross references represented by <ptr> elements):

See especially <ref target="#SEC12">section 12 on page
34</ref>.

See especially <ptr target="#SEC12"/>.

The value of the target attribute must have been used as the identifier of some other element within the current document. This implies that the passage or phrase being pointed at must bear an identifier, and must therefore be tagged as an element of some kind. In the following example, the cross reference is to a <div> element:

...
see especially <ptr target="#SEC12"/>.
...

<div xml:id="SEC12">
<head>Concerning Identifiers</head>

</div>

Because the xml:id attribute is global, any element in a document may be pointed to in this way. In the following example, a paragraph has been given an identifier so that it may be pointed at:

...
this is discussed in <ref target="#pspec">the paragraph on links</ref>
...

<p xml:id="pspec">Links may be made to any kind of element
...</p>

Sometimes the target of a cross reference does not correspond with any particular feature of a text, and so may not be tagged as an element of some kind. If the desired target is simply a point in the current document, the easiest way to mark it is by introducing an <anchor> element at the appropriate spot. If the target is some sequence of words not otherwise tagged, the <seg> element may be introduced to mark them. These two elements are described as follows:

anchor/ (anchor point) attaches an identifier to a point within a text, whether or not it corresponds with a textual element.
seg (arbitrary segment) represents any segmentation of text below the ‘chunk’ level.

In the following (imaginary) example, <ref> elements have been used to represent points in this text which are to be linked in some way to other parts of it; in the first case to a point, and in the second, to a sequence of words:

Returning to <ref target="#ABCD">the point where I dozed
off</ref>, I noticed that <ref target="#EFGH">three
words</ref> had been circled in red by a previous reader

This encoding requires that elements with the specified identifiers (ABCD and EFGH in this example) are to be found somewhere else in the current document. Assuming that no element already exists to carry these identifiers, the <anchor> and <seg> elements may be used:

.... <anchor type="bookmark" xml:id="ABCD"/> ....
....<seg type="target" xml:id="EFGH"> ... </seg> ...

The type attribute should be used (as above) to distinguish amongst different purposes for which these general purpose elements might be used in a text. Some other uses are discussed in section 8.3 Special kinds of Linking below.

8.2 Pointing to other documents

So far, we have shown how the elements <ptr> and <ref> may be used for cross-references or links whose targets occur within the same document as their source. However, the same elements may also be used to refer to elements in any other XML document or resource, such as a document on the web, or a database component. This is possible because the value of the target attribute may be any valid universal resource indicator (URI). A full definition of this term, defined by the W3C (the consortium which manages the development and maintenance of the World Wide Web), is beyond the scope of this tutorial: however, the most frequently encountered version of a URI is the familiar ‘URL’ used to indicate a web page, such as http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml.

A URL may reference a web page or just a part of one, for example http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml#SEC2. The sharp sign indicates that what follows it is the identifier of an element to be located within the XML document identified by what precedes it: this example will therefore locate an element which has an xml:id attribute value of SEC2 within the document retrieved from http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml. In the examples we have discussed so far, the part to the left of the sharp sign has been omitted: this is understood to mean that the referenced element is to be located within the current document.

Within a URL, parts of an XML document can be specified by means of other more sophisticated mechanisms, using a special language called Xpath, also defined by the W3C. This is particularly useful where the elements to be linked to do not bear identifiers and must therefore be located by some other means. A full specification of the language is well beyond the scope of this document; here we provide only a flavour of its power.

In the XPath language, locations are defined as a series of steps, each one identifying some part of the document, often in terms of the locations identified by the previous step. For example, you would point to the third sentence of the second paragraph of chapter two by selecting chapter two in the first step, the second paragraph in the second step, and the third sentence in the last step. A step can be defined in terms of the document tree itself, using such concepts as parent, descendent, preceding, etc. or, more loosely, in terms of text patterns, word or character positions.

8.3 Special kinds of Linking

The following special purpose linking attributes are defined for every element in the TEI Lite scheme:

ana: links an element with its interpretation.
corresp: links an element with one or more other corresponding elements.
next: links an element to the next element in an aggregate.
prev: links an element to the previous element in an aggregate.

The ana (analysis) attribute is intended for use where a set of abstract analyses or interpretations have been defined somewhere within a document, as further discussed in section 15 Interpretation and Analysis. For example, a linguistic analysis of the sentence ‘John loves Nancy’ might be encoded as follows:

<seg type="sentence" ana="SVO">
<seg type="lex" ana="#NP1">John</seg>
<seg type="lex" ana="#VVI">loves</seg>
<seg type="lex" ana="#NP1">Nancy</seg>
</seg>

This encoding implies the existence elsewhere in the document of elements with identifiers SVO, NP1, and VV1 where the significance of these particular codes is explained. Note the use of the <seg> element to mark particular components of the analysis, distinguished by the type attribute.

The corresp (corresponding) attribute provides a simple way of representing some form of correspondence between two elements in a text. For example, in a multilingual text, it may be used to link translation equivalents, as in the following example

<seg xml:lang="fra" xml:id="FR1" corresp="#EN1">Jean aime Nancy</seg>
<seg xml:lang="en" xml:id="EN1" corresp="#FR1">John loves Nancy</seg>

The same mechanism may be used for a variety of purposes. In the following example, it has been used to represent anaphoric correspondences between ‘the show’ and ‘Shirley’, and between ‘NBC’ and ‘the network’:

<p>
<title xml:id="shirley">Shirley</title>, which made
its Friday night debut only a month ago, was
not listed on <name xml:id="nbc">NBC</name>'s new schedule,
although <seg xml:id="network" corresp="#nbc">the network</seg>
says <seg xml:id="show" corresp="#shirley">the show</seg>
still is being considered.
</p>

The next and prev attributes provide a simple way of linking together the components of a discontinuous element, as in the following example:

<q xml:id="Q1a" next="#Q1b">Who-e debel you?</q>
— he at last said — <q xml:id="Q1b" prev="#Q1a">you no speak-e,
damme, I kill-e.</q> And so saying,
the lighted tomahawk began flourishing
about me in the dark.

9 Editorial Interventions

The process of encoding an electronic text has much in common with the process of editing a manuscript or other text for printed publication. In either case a conscientious editor may wish to record both the original state of the source and any editorial correction or other change made in it. The elements discussed in this and the next section provide some facilities for meeting these needs.

9.1 Correction and Normalization

The following elements may be used to mark correction, that is editorial changes introduced where the editor believes the original to be erroneous:

corr (correction) contains the correct form of a passage apparently erroneous in the copy text.
sic (latin for thus or so) contains text reproduced although apparently incorrect or inaccurate.

The following elements may be used to mark normalization, that is editorial changes introduced for the sake of consistency or modernization of a text:

orig (original form) contains a reading which is marked as following the original, rather than being normalized or corrected.
reg (regularization) contains a reading which has been regularized or normalized in some sense.

As an example, consider this extract from the quarto printing of Shakespeare's Henry V.

... for his nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green feelds

A modern editor might wish to make a number of interventions here, specifically to modernize (or normalise) the Elizabethan spellings of a' and feelds for he and fields respectively. He or she might also want to emend table to babbl'd, following an editorial tradition that goes back to the 18th century Shakesperean scholar Theobald. The following encoding would then be appropriate:

... for his nose was as sharp as a pen and <reg>he</reg>
<corr resp="#Theobald">babbl'd</corr> of green

<reg>fields</reg>

A more conservative or source-oriented editor, however, might want to retain the original, but at the same time signal that some of the readings it contains are in some sense anomalous:

... for his nose was as sharp as a pen and <orig>a</orig>
<sic>table</sic> of green

<orig>feelds</orig>

Finally, a modern digital editor may decide to combine both possibilities in a single composite text, using the <choice> element.

choice groups a number of alternative encodings for the same point in a text.

This allows an editor to mark where alternative readings are possible:

... for his nose was
as sharp as a pen and
<choice>
<orig>a</orig>
<reg>he</reg>
</choice>
<choice>
<corr resp="#Theobald">babbl'd</corr>
<sic>table</sic>
</choice>
of green

<choice>
<orig>feelds</orig>
<reg>fields</reg>
</choice>

9.2 Omissions, Deletions, and Additions

In addition to correcting or normalizing words and phrases, editors and transcribers may also supply missing material, omit material, or transcribe material deleted or crossed out in the source. In addition, some material may be particularly hard to transcribe because it is hard to make out on the page. The following elements may be used to record such phenomena:

add (addition) contains letters, words, or phrases inserted in the text by an author, scribe, annotator, or corrector.
gap indicates a point where material has been omitted in a transcription, whether for editorial reasons described in the TEI header, as part of sampling practice, or because the material is illegible, invisible, or inaudible.
del (deletion) contains a letter, word, or passage deleted, marked as deleted, or otherwise indicated as superfluous or spurious in the copy text by an author, scribe, annotator, or corrector.
unclear contains a word, phrase, or passage which cannot be transcribed with certainty because it is illegible or inaudible in the source.

These elements may be used to record changes made by an editor, by the transcriber, or (in manuscript material) by the author or scribe. For example, if the source for an electronic text read

The following elements are provided for for simple editorial interventions.

then it might be felt desirable to correct the obvious error, but at the same time to record the deletion of the superfluous second for, thus:

The following elements are provided for
<del resp="#LB">for</del> simple editorial interventions.

The attribute value LB on the resp attribute indicates that ‘LB’ corrected the duplication of for.

If the source read

The following elements provided for simple editorial interventions.

(i.e. if the verb had been inadvertently dropped) then the corrected text might read:

The following elements <add resp="#LB">are</add> provided for
simple editorial interventions.

These elements are not limited to changes made by an editor; they can also be used to record authorial changes in manuscripts. A manuscript in which the author has first written ‘How it galls me, what a galling shadow’, then crossed out the word galls and inserted dogs might be encoded thus:

How it <del hand="DHL" type="overstrike">galls</del>
<add hand="DHL" place="supralinear">dogs</add> me,
what a galling shadow

Similarly, the <unclear> and <gap> elements may be used together to indicate the omission of illegible material; the following example also shows the use of <add> for a conjectural emendation:

One hundred & twenty good regulars joined to me
<unclear>
<gap reason="indecipherable"/>
</unclear>
& instantly, would aid me signally <add hand="ed">in?</add>
an enterprise against Wilmington.

The <del> element marks material which is transcribed as part of the electronic text despite being marked as deleted, while <gap> marks the location of material which is omitted from the electronic text, whether it is legible or not. A language corpus, for example, might omit long quotations in foreign languages:

<p> ... An example of a list appearing in a fief ledger of
<name type="place">Koldinghus</name>
<date>1611/12</date>
is given below. It shows cash income from a sale of
honey.</p>
<gap>
<desc>quotation from ledger (in Danish)</desc>
</gap>
<p>A description of the overall structure of the account is
once again ... </

Prefatory note