TEI by Example Module 2: The TEI Header Ron Van den Branden Edward Vanhoutte Melissa Terras Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) Centre for Data, Culture and Society, University of Edinburgh, UK Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), University College London, UK Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), King’s College London, UK Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) , Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium
Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature Koningstraat 18 9000 Gent Belgium
ctb@kantl.be Edward Vanhoutte Melissa Terras Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) , Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) , Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium Gent
Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature Koningstraat 18 9000 Gent Belgium

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

9 July 2010 TEI by Example. Edward Vanhoutte editor Ron Van den Branden editor Melissa Terras editor

Digitally born

TEI by Example offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Besides a general introduction to text encoding, step-by-step tutorial modules provide example-based introductions to eight different aspects of electronic text markup for the humanities. Each tutorial module is accompanied with a dedicated examples section, illustrating actual TEI encoding practice with real-life examples. The theory of the tutorial modules can be tested in interactive tests and exercises.

 en-GB technical revision corrected significant typo (biblStruct for biblFull), removed ref around gi release corrected typos + examples creation
Christopher Marlowe: The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text)

This example contains the TEI header of the digital edition of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text), encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library.

This TEI header provides decent descriptions of the publication details of the electronic text (publicationStmt), and the languages occurring in the text (langUsage). A reference system is declared in the encodingDesc section of the header, using refState elements (see section 2.3.5.3 Milestone Method of the TEI Guidelines).

The revision description is interesting both in a positive and a negative way. It clearly contains a detailed list of the changes. The list seems to be generated by an automated versioning system, which allows one to keep complete track of a file’s historical states, and document changes with log messages. Integrating automated revision control in the revisionDesc section of the TEI header is an interesting idea, as it combines processability and expressiveness. However, on the encoding level, this integration could be improved. In this case, a single change element is (ab)used to record the complete revision history. If the output of the automated version control system would be formatted to distinct change elements per revision (either directly, or via a post-processing step), this would make the information much more compliant with the semantics of the TEI header.

One essential point of critique concerns the lacking description of the source document in sourceDesc. In this case, the title and author of the source work (that can be recollected from the information in the titleStmt subsection) still provide cues to its origin, but this could be much harder for less known texts. It is reasonable to suppose that the source texts of the files in the Perseus Digital Library are documented externally, but then the TEI header sections of these files should at least contain a pointer to these resources.

The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text) Christopher Marlowe Hilary Binda Perseus Project, Tufts University Gregory Crane Prepared under the supervision of Lisa Cerrato William Merrill Elli Mylonas David Smith Tufts University Trustees of Tufts University Medford, MA Perseus Project

This text may be freely distributed, subject to the following restrictions: You credit Perseus, as follows, whenever you use the document: Text provided by Perseus Digital Library, with funding from Tufts University. Original version available for viewing and download at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. You leave this availability statement intact. You use it for non-commercial purposes only. You offer Perseus any modifications you make.

English Latin Greek Italian $Log: marl.faustb.xml,v $ Revision 1.2 2004/04/22 14:24:57 cwulfman *** empty log message *** Revision 1.1 2004/04/22 13:55:24 cwulfman Making xml files the canonical ones. Revision 1.11 2003/07/01 22:14:53 yorkc Updated texts to TEI P4 and Perseus P4 extensions; minor cleanup (esp. character encodings and typos.) Revision 1.10 2000/04/27 23:22:22 dasmith Hopperized TEI header. Fixed typos. Revision 1.9 1999/09/01 17:15:34 dasmith Fixed preamble and added encodingDesc. Revision 1.8 1997/09/11 16:00:37 textgod Updated for nsgmls. Revision 1.7 1997/07/02 21:57:11 textgod Added CASTLIST HEAD Revision 1.6 1997/06/30 21:57:09 textgod Added group for the prologue. Revision 1.5 1997/06/25 14:51:39 textgod Fixed broken NAME tag. Revision 1.4 1997/06/25 14:40:00 textgod Added log messages to file. Adapted from a TEI P4 XML encoding of Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (Marlowe 1616). TEI XML source available from .
Erasmus, Desiderius. 1867-1872. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami colloquia familiaria. Lipsiae: sumptibus Ottonis Holtze. Encoded and made available by the Stoa Consortium, University of Kentucky at . Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. 1885. Letter of November 7, 1885. Encoded and made available by the Lincoln Electronic Text Center of the University of Nebraska at . Islam, Mubina. 2004. A Selection of Sonnets: electronic edition encoded in XML with a TEI DTD. Unpublished Master’s Dissertation, London: University College London. Marlowe, Christopher. 1616. The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus. Encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library. Available online at . Shakespeare, William. 1978. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by Alexander, Peter. London: Collins. Whitman, Walt. 1890. After the Argument. Manuscript encoded and made available by the Walt Whitman Archive at . Wilde, Oscar. 1930. The Importance of Being Earnest. In: Plays, Prose Writings and Poems. London: Everyman. Encoded and made available by CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork. Available online at .