TEI by Example Module 3: Prose 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

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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 practise with real-life examples. The theory of the tutorial modules can be tested in interactive tests and exercises.

 en-GB integrated examples in a single file
Willa Cather: Roll Call on the Prairies

The following example is an excerpt from Willa Carther’s Roll Call on the Prairies in The Red Cross Magazine, 1919. This prose account of life during the first World War in the plains of Nebraska is encoded in paragraphs. Page numbers occur in pb tags, with the actual page number as the value of the n attribute.

This example contains the encoding of a picture in a figure element, grouping together a heading (head) and a description of the image (figDesc. The actual digital representation of the picture is pointed to with the graphic element, whose url attribute carries the URL of the digital scan.

Notice that in this example, a couple of things could have been further encoded. The foreign mail phrase could be identified with a soCalled tag; the fragment And in this country pride, could be encoded as direct speech with a q element, either with or without retaining the quotation marks in the actual transcription.

Letters from the front usually reached our town on Saturday nights. The "foreign mail" had become a feature of life in Kansas and Nebraska. The letters came in bunches; if one mother heard from her son, so did half a dozen others. One could hear them chatting to each other about what Vernon thought of Bordeaux, or what Roy had to say about the farming country along the Oise, or how much Elmer had enjoyed his rest leave in Paris. To me, knowing the boys, nearly all of these letters were remarkable. The most amusing were those which made severe strictures upon American manners; the boys were afraid the French would think us all farmers! One complained that his comrade

Fifty dollars saved from egg money for a needed new dress and coat went for a Liberty Bond "to help fight Austria"

Illustration of two women standing in a parlor, one the Liberty Bond canvasser and the other the woman of the house who buys a Liberty Bond with her egg money.

talked and pushed chairs about in the Y hut while the singers who came to entertain them were on the platform. "And in this country, too, the Home of Politeness! Some yaps have no pride," he wrote bitterly. I can say for the boys from our town that they wanted to make a good impression.

 A fragment of a TEI encoding of Willa Cather’s Roll Call on the Prairies (Cather 1919). TEI XML source available from .
Bronte, Emily. 1847. Wuthering Heights. London: Thomas Cautley Newby, publisher. Encoded and made available by the University of Virginia Library, Text Collection at . Cather, Willa. 1919. Roll Call on the Prairies. The Red Cross Magazine, 14 (July 1919). 27–31. Edited by Andrew Jewell. Lincoln: Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Available online at . Jones, Malcolm. 2006. Print of the month, September 2006. British Printed Images to 1700. London: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College. Available online at . Morgan, Eric Lease. 1997). Clarence meets Alcuin; or, expert systems are still an option in reference work. In: The Cybrarian’s manual. Edited by P. Ensor. Chicago: American Library Association. 127–134. Available online at . Muller, Charles. s.d. XML Technical Notes on the Yogācāra Bibliography. Accompanying documentation for the Yogācāra Buddhism Research Association. Available online at .