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

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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 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
Exploring a Minimal TEI Header

Let’s start this section with a mental exercise (though you are free to make it as physical as you want). Before the holidays, your partner presents you with a short list of book titles she would like to read. Since it is you who took a day off early, you take this wish list and set out to the public library. Most of the titles are easy to find, except for the somewhat more cryptic entry: Balzac or Zola (don't know exactly) ? something about a magic donkey (in English please!!!) -- sorry, dear, you're the best!

There are many ways you could approach this problem: flesh out all works by Zola and Balzac on the library shelves and try to find the one(s) dealing with magic donkeys have a look at the available titles in the translated literature section try to google for more information first

Depending on how greatly you value your free time, you will probably start / end up asking the librarian, who will either scan her current knowledge of world literature or a catalogue of library records. Or, if you live in the twenty-first century, you will probably move to one of the library’s computer terminals, search for Balzac or Zola in the author field, narrow the search to English translations, and give it a try with donkey in the title field. If you lived in the twenty-second century, the search robot could probably analyse your search query, propose alternatives for unsuccessful search terms, and even suggest you’d give it a try with ass instead of donkey. For the time being, however, you’ll have to depend on your (librarian’s) world knowledge, patience, and/or creativity in order to find following information:

A library catalogue record.

It is the last field of this library catalogue that will guide you to the right library shelf and a superb holiday. This exercise vulgarises the motivation to abstract primary information about bibliographic objects into fixed categories. In the analog world, this happened on printed library catalogue records; nowadays these are entered as digital records in databases of library catalogues. These fixed categories together make up an identity card of a literary work.

The TEI Guidelines consider such a virtual identity card an essential part of each TEI document. It must be encoded within a teiHeader element, before the actual text contents in the text part. The ID categories of the TEI header are the subject of this tutorial module. As a trade-off between exhaustivity and usability, the TEI Guidelines define a wide range of specific TEI Header elements, only a few of which are mandatory. A minimal TEI header for the work described in the catalogue record above would look as follows:

The Wild Ass’s Skin: an electronic edition

Published as an example for the header module of TBE.

Honoré de Balzac (1906). The Wild Ass’s Skin.

 A minimal TEI header.

This example shows how a teiHeader element must contain a fileDesc (file description) element, providing a description of the electronic file. In order to be complete, it must consist of three subsections, in that order: titleStmt: a title statement about the electronic text publicationStmt: information on the publication of the electronic text sourceDesc: a bibliographic description of the source for the electronic text

The titleStmt element must minimally contain a title for the electronic text. Depending on the nature of this text, this title may repeat the original’s title, followed by a paraphrase like electronic version/transcription/edition. Details about the publication and source of the electronic text must be provided in publicationStmt and sourceDesc respectively. These details ca be given either as informal prose in loose paragraphs, or in specialised elements. Those are covered in detail in the next sections of this tutorial.

You will have noticed that this minimal example of a TEI header does quite a poor job providing an identity card of this novel, compared to the library record example above. However, there are two things of notice: the TEI header is an integral part of any TEI document, and must precede the text element with the actual text content the TEI header minimally documents aspects of the title, publication, and source of the electronic text

Of course, the TEI header allows for much more descriptive sophistication. The most important sections of the TEI header are treated in the next sections of this tutorial.

The TEI header contains meta-information about the electronic text, and is considered an integral part of it. Therefore, the teiHeader element must precede the text part of any TEI text, documenting at least some aspects of the electronic text in a fileDesc element. A file description minimally contains information about the title of the electronic text in titleStmt, about its publication in publicationStmt, and bibliographic information about the source document from which it is derived sourceDesc.