Standards for digital encoding

Summary: The course introduces the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, an open standard for the representation of texts in digital form, based on XML. The TEI Guidelines specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. In addition to the Guidelines themselves, TEI provides a variety of supporting resources, including materials for learning TEI, information on projects using the TEI, TEI-related publications, and software developed for or adapted to the TEI. The course will introduce the TEI Guidelines Version P5 and show how to apply them for use on various text types, such as encoding of digital editions, dictionaries, and annotated corpora. Lectures are accompanied by hands-on sessions. The course should enable students to understand, produce, and use TEI encoded texts of various types and for various purposes.

Related course: Text-critical editions in TEI

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Timetable "Standards for digital encoding" 2009/2010

Week	Date	Topics	Lecture materials	Lab session	Assignment
1	4/12/09	Overview	Burnard, Driscoll, Rahtz: Digital Texts, XML, and TEI Burnard, Driscoll, Rahtz: TEI overview	Oxygen XML editor Making the TEI Absolutely Bare with Roma Modelling an HTML document in TEI: recipe	Modelling an HTML document in TEI, for preference form Wikipedia.
2	10/12/09	Parametrising TEI	TEI@Oxford: Introduction to Customising the TEI with Roma TEI: Learning ODD TEI P5: Using TEI P5 TEI P5: TEI P5 Infrastructure	Next steps with Roma: available templates, adding, removing modules and elements, an example parametrisation
3	11/12/09	More TEI elements and attributes	Bauman, Flanders: Language identification Bauman, Flanders: Pointing and inclusion TEI@Oxford: Linking	Making a document with linked texts
4	7/1/10	TEI stylesheets	TEI stylesheets & Stylebear TEI@Oxford: TEI XSLT Stylesheets for Transformation, Excercise	Conversion to HTML
5	8/1/10	Character sets	TEI P5: Representation of Non-standard Characters and Glyphs TEI@Oxford: Representation of Non-standard Characters and Glyphs	Student presentations: plan for seminar work
6	14/1/10	Linguistic analysis	TEI Guidelines: Transcriptions of Speech, Simple Analytic Mechanisms TEI@Oxford: Analysis, Speech and Linguistics	Part-of-speech tagging Marking up a document with PoS tags
7	15/1/10	Parametrising TEI II.	TEI@Oxford: Customising the TEI with Roma, Part II.	Adding a new element to TEI

Assesment and Due Dates

The course score is computed on the basis of:

• Assignments (30%): two assignments, to be handed in one, max. two weeks after receiving the assignment.
• Project (70%): composed of the practical work + written report, formatted as a usual conference paper. The project work is to be presented at the last lecture (15.1.2010) and the report handed in by the end of the term (1.2.2007), at the latest.

Reading materials

The course materials are heavily based on the following sources, by Syd Bauman, Lou Burnard, Matthew Driscoll, Julia Flanders, Sebastian Rahtz, and others:

• TEI@Oxford materials
• TEI Training. Sofia, October 2005
• Intensive Introduction to TEI. Brown University, August 2006
• Workshop on Development of Skills in Advanced Text Encoding with TEI P5, September 18-20 2006

Thanks to all the people who have put work in preparing the above materias, and special thanks for making them available on the web and allowing others to teach by them!

Useful links:

• TEI home page
• A Gentle Introduction to XML, TEI Lite
• TEI P5 / Roma
• W3C: XML, XPath, XSLT
• Unicode, Character encoding tutorial

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