You already have TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows), and you can edit a TEI file with these programs, but your life will easier with tools designed for working with XML. You can edit XML in any ‘plain-text editor’, a program that allows you to work with the exact characters being sent to a computer. TEI lets us note these things precisely, which makes it easier to work as a team across different fields, and allows us to create editions that are ‘technology-independent’ – that work equally well online, in print, or using accessibility devices. For instance, when you put text in italics, that doesn’t tell us whether it’s a foreign word, a title, or a biblical quotation.

But we need to think about the text’s semantic meaning. When you’re writing a file in a program such as Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, it forces to you look at your work in visual terms. TEI is based on XML, which works exactly like the HTML tags that underlie every website.Įditing a file with TEI is much more precise than using a word processor. The Text Encoding Initiative is a ‘markup language’, a set of standard tags that tell a computer how to interpret a file. So how do you create TEI files? What is TEI? But it’s not a piece of software that you can install on your computer. You will quickly hear about the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) if you spend any amount of time looking into producing a digital edition.

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