Last month, I led a workshop for the GC Digital Initiatives on “Getting Started with TEI.” For those who don’t know, TEI (short for Text Encoding Initiative) is a method for encoding, or “tagging,” texts in such a way that both humans and computers can make sense of them. It is a set of guidelines used for electronic editing and working with textual data in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics, which is based on XML (the eXtensible Markup Language).  With TEI, editors and scholars can “tag” a text for various features such as structure, typography, or references. My workshop specifically focused on how TEI facilitates the digital transcription of hand-written manuscripts. We practiced encoding a couple of pages from Oscar Wilde’s manuscript of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” paying particular attention to how Wilde edited out the homosexual elements and innuendos as he revised his draft.

This blog post shares highlights from the workshop as well as additional resources for getting started with TEI.