Choosing a Text to Encode

Each student will need to identify a text or collection of texts to encode using the TEI. I would recommend that you choose something you are interested in studying and you may want to think of this assignment as an opportunity to begin a text encoding project that you could imagine becoming part of a research project, conference paper, dissertation chapter, etc. If you are working on the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate this could be the start of something that you could develop further for your digital project, for more information see. Certificate Requirements and Certificate FAQs. If you are struggling to find something appropriate, please meet with me to discuss possibilities.

While I want you to find something of interest to your work, I do have a couple of qualifiers because I want you to gain experience with different kinds of data and different approaches to using the TEI.

  • Length
    • Think in terms of 5-8 pages of text. This can be an entire text, a piece of a large text, or several small texts. If you do very simple encoding of a very straightforward text, this might not be very much work. If you have a difficult text and mark things up in extreem detail, 5 pages very well might take you beyond a reasonable amount of work. At the beginning, aim to find a text in this 5-8 page range. If your research aims are better met by a shorter or longer text, I am happy to discuss a different scale for your encoding project.
  • Content
    • Your encoding project needs to include both the encoding of a text and also some standoff markup. Find a text that includes at least two of the following: persons, places, or content that would benefit from a taxonomy describing that content. Such content could include physical objects, concepts, etc.

To Submit for Evaluation

  • Text Encoding
    • You will produce a TEI-encoded XML file for each text or piece of text you encode. For some students, this will be one XML file. Other students will produce several XML files, one for each smaller text they encode.
  • Standoff Markup
    • You will also need to mark up information about the content of your text as discussed above. If you have a taxonomy as one of your two additional data types, that will appear in the header of your main TEI file. If you have one or both of the others, you will encode that in a separate TEI file. We will discuss standoff markup in more detail in class.
  • Valid TEI

Due Date

  • You should work locally on your own machine but commit and push (preferably to a draft repository) in GitHub on a regular basis. You will need to share a link to these files on GitHub by the due date for final work 11 December.