What is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)?
The TEI is a set of standards for the encoding of electronic texts. It was launched in 1987 with the support of the Association for Computing and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computational Linguistics. A new non-profit TEI Consortium was established in December 2000 to maintain and develop the TEI. The TEI has become the de facto international standard for scholarly work with electronic texts. Its use enables electronic documents to be searched, sorted and presented to users in a variety of formats, and allows elements to be extracted from them for analysis. The TEI can handle many types of texts, but the focus is on primary sources of interest to scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. It can also be used for the textual material which must surround digital images in order to make them searchable. The TEI guidelines were originally based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). A new, updated v
