Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange Vols 1&2; P4 Edition

Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, published by the TEI Consortium (www.tei-c.org), is a two-volume reference work for the production of electronic texts in software- and hardware- independent XML or SGML, providing a standard format for data interchange in humanities research and suggesting principles for the encoding of texts in the same format. The guidelines, first published in 1994, are the cumulative and regularly updated result of fifteen years of interdisciplinary analysis and consultation, drawing on the work of scholars and technical experts worldwide to produce a standard for the digital representation of literary and linguistic texts. This reference work is widely used in libraries, and it is the de facto standard for scholarly work with electronic texts.By defining a standard set of names, the guidelines make it possible for different computer representations of texts to be combined into vast databases, and they also provide a common language for scholars wishing to work collaboratively. There are many such standard vocabularies in various industries -- in banking, in aircraft maintenance, in chemical modeling, for example -- and the TEI's achievement has been to provide the same for textual and linguistic data, both for those working with the written culture of the past and for those studying the development of language itself.