TEI

The text enconding initiative, TEI, is a consortium which collectively develops and mantains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. It is an established standard that is used by libraries, museums and many scholars to represent literary and linguistical texts electronically and for on-line research, teaching and preservation. This system has been used and continually developed since 1987 by a group of people from various research institutions.

The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (referred to as the TEI Guidelines) were first published in 1994 and represent a tremendous achievement in electronic text standards by providing a highly sophisticated structure for encoding electronic text. Digital librarians have benefited greatly from the standardization provided by these guidelines, and the potential for interoperability and long-term preservation of digital collections facilitated by their wide adoption.

The main objectives of the TEI project are the following: preserving a text, increasing the availability of a text, ensuring the longevity of a digital file, making texts more portable and enhancing a text with a descriptive data. This is the structure of a TEI document:

<!–Locate DTD: –>
                <!DOCTYPE TEI.2 SYSTEM “tei2.dtd”>
               
                <!–Root TEI.2 element. –>
                <TEI.2>
                   
                    <!–A header.–>
                    <teiHeader>
                        <!–header content–>
                    </teiHeader>
                   
                    <!–The main body of the text starts here.–>
                    <text>
                        <!–additional elements that define the different parts of the text–>
                    </text>
                   
                    </TEI.2>

SOURCES:

*http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml; accessed on 11th february 2008, 14:08

*http://www.diglib.org/standards/tei.htm#background; accessed on 11th february 2008, 14:14

*http://thinkingtoomuchagain.blogspot.com/2006/02/total-textual-analysis-tei.html; accessed on 11th february 2008, 14:16