Thanks to coding, researchers in the humanities have the opportunity to visualize and analyze their data in different interfaces and manipulate them in various themes. TEI, which provides the thematic coding according to the needs of human researchers and their own conscious choices beyond the language of the software world, ensures the digitization and protection of data in a standardized format. However, a coded text can create a standard humanities coding template. For this reason, electronically generated data may be subject to corruption or changes resulting from different software. Computer software, which is mostly under the control of private companies and whose sustainability strategies depend on the private sectors, has structural differences. Thanks to TEI, which was created in 1994, researchers have the ability to reveal thematic connections between words, and to analyze the meanings of words, not only their graphic structures. Thus, it can be constantly updated according to developing and changing needs. But the TEI XML document always looks the same.Ĭommunity-driven: TEI has combination of flexibility focusing on the scientific needs of a particular community. There can be changes in transfers from your PC to someone else’s Mac or Linux computer with loss of information. Software independence: each computer has their own idiosyncratic ways of storing information. Meaning before format: You can make meaning-based queries to easily distinguish whether the word London in the text is in Canada or England, or whether it is a surname of a person. 2 Burnard mentions some specific advantages of TEI XML documents in the Introduction: “Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics.” 1 Lou Burnard, in his book titled What Is The Text Encoding Initiative?, mentions the benefits of the TEI project for the humanities.

The “ Text Encoding Initiative” (TEI) offers the most comprehensive guide to the computerized coding of texts in the humanities field today.

Text encoding initiative tei