TEI by Example

The Header of a Complex Text

Before we end, let’s go back to where we left you: the library, in front of the library catalogue or computer screen. Prepared for the possibility that this copy of the book may be in loan, you find another reference to The Wild Ass’s Skin in the record of La Comédie Humaine (look for 505 8 0 |gPhilosophic and analytic studies: v. 41. The|tmagic skin; The Magic Skin is an alternative title for the English translation):

A library catalogue record for a complex work.

Now that’s a record! If you thought the truckload of possibilities for the description of electronic texts in the TEI header set your head spinning already, imagine what an electronic edition of La Comédie Humaine might look like! Code 300 tells us that it has no less than 53 volumes, with different titles per volume.

One way of encoding this majestic work as a whole would be to treat La Comédie Humaine as a kind of supertext containing all different works. This can be done in TEI by treating the whole as a teiCorpus, containing each separate work in its own TEI text. As each of these TEI texts needs its own TEI header, you can imagine the amount of meta-information, much of which will have to be repeated. This can be avoided by placing the common meta-information in the teiHeader element of the teiCorpus element, while retaining all work-specific meta-information in the TEI header section of the respective TEI text. This mechanism allows you to be maximally expressive in the description of all texts in a TEI corpus, and maximally efficient in the reduction of common information in the individual TEI headers.

The following example gives an impression of what a TEI header for an electronic edition of La Comédie Humaine might look like:

La Comédie Humaine Honoré de Balzac The TBE crew Ron Van den Branden transcription annotation Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) Centre for Data, Culture and Society, University of Edinburgh, UK Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) - King's College London University College London (UCL)

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 0.5 Gb Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) - King's College London Gent

Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature Koningstraat 18 9000 Gent Belgium

0-00-000000-9 Published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. 1 January 2110 The TBE collection: sample texts encoded with TEI. Edward Vanhoutte compiler 0000-0001 OCR scanning done at KANTL, Ghent. La Comédie Humaine by Honoré de Balzac. London : Caxton, 1895-1900. 53 v..

Apparent errors have been corrected using the sic> corr elements, wrapped in a choice element.

Spelling has been modernised using the orig / reg elements, wrapped in a choice element.

Diplomatic transcription, all original quotation marks have been retained and normalised to double quotation marks.

End-of-line hyphenation has been removed. All other hyphenation has been retained.

Thematic analysis added, studying the main motifs.

Names and dates are marked.

Text encoded for The TBE collection: sample texts encoded with TEI, aiming at providing a collection of prime exemplar TEI encoded materials.

The paragraphs in the text are numbered with the n attribute. Each number consists of four digits; numbering is consecutive throughout the book. For example: 0203 numbers the 203th paragraph throughout the book.

Each chapter is identified with a formal identification code inside the xml:id attribute. Chapters are numbered using arabic numerals. The codes are composed by concatenating the identification codes for all ancestor text divisions down to the chapter level, with the dot as separation marker. For example: I.2.3 identifies the third chapter of the second book of the first volume.

Dewey Decimal Classification Abridged Edition 14 Library of Congress Subject Headings long syllable short syllable foot boundary line boundary English French Arabic final proofing addition of thematic analysis addition of explanatory notes spell check addition of phrase level markup file creation The Wild Ass’s Skin: an electronic edition Ellen Marriage George Saintsbury Version 2.0, enriched with thematic annotations. 2010 Melissa Terras Added thematic annotations. 572 Kb 0-00-000000-0 1 January 2010 The Wild Ass’s Skin by Honoré de Balzac. London : Dent, 1906. xv, 288 p.. Translated by Ellen Marriage ; preface by George Saintsbury. Original written in 1831 in Paris. English French Arabic Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Literature--Translations into English 843.7 handwriting in blue ink by James Harding, previous owner of the book Arabic script addition of thematic analysis addition of explanatory notes spell check addition of phrase level markup file creation Encoding common metadata of a composite work in the teiHeader of a teiCorpus element.

The TEI Guidelines provide refined ways of associating contextual information with specific (parts of) texts. See section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text for more information. A complex text encoded as a teiCorpus should have a teiHeader in its own right. This TEI header on the corpus level can contain the general descriptive information about all corpus texts embedded as TEI documents. Each corpus text then should have its own teiHeader, describing only those aspects that are specific to that text.