The Text Coding Initiative (TEI) defines a set of guidelines for encoding digital texts. TEI encoding does much more than just make texts readable on the Internet--it allows for important bibliographic metadata to be associated with the text, and also makes it possible to encode structural features of the text (such as rhyme schemes, utterances, and character names) to enable better retrieval and deeper analysis. TEI by Example is a good place to get a quick taste of what TEI consists of--Section 5 TEI: Ground Rules stands by itself and is relatively easy to understand.
While TEI Lite, a subset of TEI "designed to meet '90% of the needs of 90% of the TEI user community'" is widely used, TEI is also extensible, allowing for customization to meet the needs of a specific project. One fun example of this is Comic Book Markup Language, developed by John Walsh. This extension allows for encoding of comics and graphic novels, including structural features such as panels and speech bubbles, and sound effects such as "ZAP!" This slide deck from a Charleston Conference 2014 presentation on CBML (screen will appear blank--click the arrows or use left/right arrow keys) explains further about CBML and also provides a useful example of TEI in action.
Thanks for the TEI description, Nikki! Glad you included bib info, as well, as you note, TEI is more than just for marking up text! (plus, really cool slidedeck from the Charleston Conf...)
ReplyDelete