Text Encoding Initiative

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); the most recent edition (TEI P4, 2002) can also be expressed in the Extensible Markup Language (XML); future versions may also be expressible in other schema languages. Such 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 the current fully revised edition of the Guidelines, which has been entirely revised for XML compatibility.

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:

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

  1. the common core of textual features be easily shared;
  2. additional specialist features be easy to add to (or remove from) a text;
  3. multiple parallel encodings of the same feature should be possible;
  4. the richness of markup should be user-defined, with a very small minimal requirement;
  5. 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 DTD and in knowing which optional parts of the full DTD are necessary for work with particular types of text.

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

The reader may judge our success in meeting these goals for him or herself. At the time of 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.

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Date: (revised October 2004) Author: Lou Burnard (revised SPQR).
Copyright TEI 1995