Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
Issue 14 | April 2021- March 2023

Selected Papers from the 2019 TEI Conference

In search of comity: TEI for distant reading
Lou Burnard, Christof Schöch and Carolin Odebrecht

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/3500
DOI: 10.4000/jtei.3500
ISSN: 2162-5603
Publisher
TEI Consortium
Electronic reference
Lou Burnard, Christof Schöch and Carolin Odebrecht, “In search of comity: TEI for distant reading”,
Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 14 | April 2021- March 2023, Online since 08 July
2021, connection on 14 March 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/3500 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.3500

For this publication a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license has been granted by theauthor(s) who retain full copyright.

In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

In search of comity: TEI for distant reading
Lou Burnard, Christof Schöch, *and* Carolin Odebrecht

SVN keywords:
pietro.liuzzo$ $Id: jtei-burnard-shoch-odebrecht-194-source.xml 1050 2021-07-09 07:09:46Z*ABSTRACT-LABEL*
Any expansion of the TEI beyond its traditional user base involves a recognition that there
are many diering answers to the traditional question “What is text, really?” We report onsome work carried out in the context of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary
History (CA16204), in particular on the TEI-conformant schemas developed for one of its principal
deliverables: the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC).
The ELTeC will contain comparable corpora for each of at least a dozen European languages, eachbeing a balanced sample of one hundred novels from the period 1840 to 1920, together withmetadata concerning their production and reception. We hope that it will become a reliable basis
for comparative work in data-driven textual analytics.
The focus of the ELTeC encoding scheme is not to represent texts in all their original complexity,
nor to duplicate the work of scholarly editors. Instead, we aim to facilitate a richer and betterinformed distant reading than a transcription of lexical content alone would permit. At the sametime, where the TEI encourages diversity, we enforce consistency by permitting representation

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Selected Papers from the 2019 TEI Conference1

In search of comity: TEI for distant readingof only a specic and quite small set of textual features, both structural and analytical. These
constraints are expressed by a master TEI ODD, from which we derive three dierent schemas by
ODD chaining, each associated with appropriate documentation.

*INDEX-LABEL**keywords-label*: distant reading, ELTeC, ODD chaining, corpus design, the European novel, literary studies

1. Introduction
1

Comity is a term from theology or political studies, where it is used to describe the formal
recognition by dierent religions, nation-states, or cultures that other such entities have as muchright to existence as themselves. In applied linguistics, the term has also been used by such writers
as Widdowson (1990) or Aston (1988) seeking to demonstrate how the establishment of comity canfacilitate successful intercultural communication, even in the absence of linguistic competence.1
We appropriate the term in this latter sense in order to reassert the interdisciplinary roots of the
TEI.

2

Recent histories of the TEI (e.g., Gavin 2017) have a tendency to underemphasize the multiplicity
of disciplines gathered at its birth, preferring to focus on those disciplines which can be plausibly
framed as preguring our current conguration of the “digital humanities” (DH) in some way. Yetboth the Poughkeepsie conference and the process of designing the Guidelines which followed
were kick-started by input from corpus linguists and computer scientists just as much as fromtraditional philologically minded editors and source-driven historians. The TEI belongs to a
multiplicity of research communities, dating as it does from a period when scholarship at large
was beginning to wake up to the implications of the advent of massive amounts of digital text
for their disciplines. The steering committee which oversaw its development and the TEI editors
alike conscientiously attempted to ensure that the Guidelines should reect a view of text which
was generally shared and generic, rather than specic to any discipline or to any particular usage
model.

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

3

The TEI necessarily attempted to address the question “What is text, really?” rst posed by
DeRose and others in 1990 (DeRose et al. 1990;see alsoCaton 2013; van Zundert and Andrews
2017). But in so doing it advanced the radical proposition that there may be such a thing as asingle abstract model of textual components, which might usefully be considered independentlyof its expression in a particular source or output, or its use in any particular discipline. Thissuggestion was necessarily at odds with at least two prevailing orthodoxies: on the one hand, theview that a text is no less and no more than the physical documents which instantiate it, and canbe adequately described and represented by its salient visual properties alone; on the other hand,the view that a text is solely a linguistic phenomenon, comprising a bag of words, the statisticalproperties of which are adequate to describe it. But the TEI tried very hard to prefer comity overconict, not only in its organization, which brought together an extraordinarily heterogeneousgroup of experts, but also in its chief outputs: a set of encoding guidelines which, while supporting
specialization, did not require any particular specialization to prevail.

4

Old orthodoxies do not die easily, and many of the same arguments are still being played out inthe somewhat dierent context of today’s DH theorizers. But in our present paper, we simply want
to explore the extent to which the TEI’s model of text can be adapted to conform to the modelof text characterizing such elds as stylometry, stylistics, textual analytics, or (to use the currentterm) “distant reading.” We hope also to explore the claim that by so doing we may facilitate theenrichment of that model, and thus facilitate more sophisticated research into textual phenomena
across dierent corpora. And we hope to demonstrate that this is best done by cultivating mutual
respect for the widely diering scientic, cultural, and linguistic traditions characterizing thiscross-European and cross-disciplinary project, that is, by acknowledging a comity of methods aswell as languages.

5

Our approach focuses on using the TEI predominantly as a format for exchange and as a starting
point for further transformation, conversion, and enrichment processes that might result indierent formats.

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

2. The COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary
History
6

The context for this work is the EU-funded COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary
History (CA 16204), a principal deliverable of which will be the European Literary Text Collection(ELTeC).2 This is a set of comparable corpora for each of at least a dozen European languages,
each corpus being a balanced selection of one hundred novels from the period 1840 to 1920,
together with metadata situating them in their contexts of production and of reception. It is hopedthat the ELTeC will become a reliable basis for comparative work in cross-linguistic data-driven
textual analytics, eventually providing an accessible benchmark for a particular written genre of
considerable cultural importance across Europe during the period between 1840 and 1920.

7

Two signicant decisions made early on in the planning of the COST Action underlie the work
reported here. First, it was agreed that the ELTeC should be delivered in a TEI-encoded format,
using a schema developed specically for the project. Second, the design of that encoding scheme,in particular the textual features it makes explicit by means of markup, should be dened as far as
possible by the needs of the distant reading research community rather than by any preexisting
notions about the nature of literary texts, to the extent that the needs of that community could
be determined. The target audience envisaged includes experts in computational stylistics, corpus
linguistics, computational literary studies, and traditional literary studies as well as more general
digital humanists, but is probably best characterized as having major enthusiasm and expertise in
the application of statistical methods to literary and linguistic analysis, and only minor interest in
the kinds of textual features on which most TEI projects have tended to focus. In various scenarios,
however, these scholars do benet from explicit markup of textual phenomena such as chapter
boundaries, quotations, notes, front and back matter, or foreign words and phrases.3

8

The work of the Action4 is carried out by four Working Groups: WG1 Scholarly Resources is
responsible for the work described in this paper; WG2 Methods and Tools is concerned with text
analytic techniques and tools; WG3 Literary Theory and History is concerned with applications
and implications of those methods and for literary theory; WG4 Dissemination is responsible foroutreach and communication.

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9

The design and construction of the ELTeC is the responsibility of WG1, as noted above. Initially, thiswork was split into three distinct tasks: First, dening selection criteria (corpus design); second,developing basic encoding methods (both for data and for metadata); and third, dening a suitableworkow for preparation of the corpus. Working papers on each of these topics plus a fourthon theoretical issues of sampling and balance were prepared for discussion and approval by themembers of WG1, and remain available from the Working Group’s website. 5

3. The ELTeC Encoding Scheme(s)10Distant reading methods cover a wide range of computational approaches to literary text analysis,
such as authorship attribution, topic modeling, character network analysis, or stylistic analysis,
but they are rarely concerned with editorial matters such as textual variation, the establishmentof an authoritative text, or production of print or online versions of a text. Consequently, the ELTeC
encoding scheme was deliberately not intended to represent source documents in all their originalcomplexity of structure or appearance, but rather to make it as simple as possible to access thewords of which the texts are composed in an informed and predictable way. The goal was neither
to duplicate the work of scholarly editors nor to produce (yet another) digital edition of a specicsource document. Rather, the encoding scheme was designed in such a way as to ensure that ELTeC
texts could be processed by simple-minded (but XML-aware) systems primarily concerned withlexis and to make life easier for the developers of such systems.

11

Next to the application scenarios for distant reading, the multilingual and European perspective of
ELTeC poses further requirements for the encoding. The encoding system should be applicable todierent languages as well as language- or context-specic publication traditions during the entire
period and across Europe. We anticipated dierent realizations of text and chapter structure anddiering paratextual organizations. Hence, our encoding schema concentrates on commonalities
rather than the specics of certain printing houses or traditions.

12

A further important principle is that ELTeC markup should oer the encoder very little choice, andthe software developer very few surprises: the number of tags available is greatly reduced, andtheir application is tightly constrained. It facilitates processing greatly if access to each part of the
XML tree can be provided in a uniform and consistent way across multiple ELTeC corpora.

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13

By default, the TEI provides a very rich vocabulary, and many subtly dierent ways of doing moreor less the same thing. TEI encoders have often taken full advantage of that to produce texts whichvary enormously, both in the set of XML tags used and in the range of attribute values associatedwith them. It is tempting, but entirely mistaken, to assume that the TEI-conformant deliverablesfrom project A will necessarily be marked up in the same way as the TEI-conformant deliverablesfrom project B.6 On the contrary, all that “TEI conformance” really guarantees is that the intended
semantics of the markup used by the two projects should be recoverable by reference to a publishedstandard, and are not entirely ad hoc or sui generis. (This may not seem much of an advance,
though it is: see further Burnard 2019).

14

Following this No Surprises principle, the simplest ELTeC schema (the “level zero” schema)provides the bare minimum of tags needed to mark up the typical structure and content of anineteenth-century novel. All preliminary matter other than the title page and any authorial
preface or introduction is discarded; the remainder is marked as a <div> of @type "titlepage"or "liminal", within a <front> element. Within the <body> of a text, the <div> element is also
used to make explicit its structural organization, with @type attribute values "part", "chapter",or "letter" only.7 For ELTeC purposes, a “chapter” is considered to be the smallest subsection of
a novel within which paragraphs of text appear directly. Further subdivisions within a chapter(often indicated conventionally by ellipses, dashes, stars, etc.) are marked using the <milestone>
element; larger groupings of <div> elements are indicated by <div> elements, always of type"part", whatever their hierarchical level. Headings, at whatever level, are always marked using

the <head> element when appearing at the start of a <div>, and the <trailer> element whenappearing at the end. Within the <div> element, only a very limited number of elements ispermitted: specically, in addition to those already mentioned, <p> or <l> (verse line). Within theseelements we nd either plain text, <hi> (highlighted), <pb> (page break), or <milestone> elements.
After some debate, the Action’s Management Committee agreed that it would be practical torequire only this tiny subset of the TEI for all ELTeC texts.
15

The texts included in an ELTeC corpus may come from dierent kinds of sources. For some language
collections, no digital texts of any kind exist: the encoder must start from page images, manuallytranscribe or put them through OCR, and introduce ELTeC markup from scratch. Such cases are,however, unusual. For most languages, existing digital texts are already available, but the encoder
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Selected Papers from the 2019 TEI Conference6In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

must research the format used and nd a way of converting it to ELTeC’s TEI encoding schema. In
some cases, a TEI version may already exist; in others, a Project Gutenberg or an eBook version; in
yet others, the text may be stored in a database of some kind. Whichever is the case, if it is possible
to retain distinctions which the ELTeC scheme permits, this is clearly desirable and feasible;
perhaps less obviously, it is also necessary to remove distinctions made by the original format
which the ELTeC scheme does not permit. This diversity of source material was one motivation for
permitting multiple encoding levels in the ELTeC scheme: at level zero, only the bare minimumof markup dened above is permitted, while at level 1 a slightly richer (though still minimalist)
encoding is dened. At level 2, additional tags are introduced to support linguistic processing ofvarious kinds, as discussed further below. Down-conversion from a higher to a lower level is always
automatically possible, but up-conversion from a lower to a higher level generally requires humanintervention or additional processing.
16

At level 1, the following additional distinctions may be made in an encoding:•the <label> element may be used for heading-like titles appearing in the middle of adivision;•the <quote> element may be used to distinguish passages such as quotations, epigraphs,
stretches of verse, and letters which seem to “oat” within the running text;•

the <corr> element may be used to indicate a passage (typically a word or phrase) which
is clearly erroneous in the original and which has been editorially corrected;•

the elements <foreign>, <emph>, or <title> are available and should be used in preference
to <hi> for passages rendered in a dierent font or otherwise made visually salient in thesource, where an encoder can do so with condence;•the element <gap> may be used to indicate where some component of a source (typicallyan illustration) has been left out of the encoding;•the elements <note> and <ref> may be used to capture the location and content ofauthorially supplied footnotes or endnotes; wherever they occur in the source, notes must
be collected together in a <div type="notes"> within a <back> element.

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17

This list of elements may seem distressingly small. It lacks entirely some elements which every
TEI introductory course regards as indispensable (no <list> or <item>; no <choice> or <abbr>;no <name> or <date>, etc.) and tolerates some practices bordering on tag abuse. For example, all
the components of a title page are marked as <p> since no specialized elements (<titlePage>,<docImprint>, etc.) are available. In the absence of specialized but culture-specic features (forexample, publisher name, imprint, and imprimatur), the encoding identies only fundamental
textual features common to every kind of text. Nevertheless, we believe that the set of concepts
it supports overlaps well with the set of textual features which almost any existing digitaltranscription will seek to preserve in some form or another. This may explain both why the
majority of the texts so far collected in the ELTeC have been encoded at level 1 rather than level 0,
and also the speed with which the collection is growing.
18

ELTeC level 1 is intended to facilitate a richer and better-informed distant reading of a text than atranscription of its lexical content alone would permit. ELTeC level 2 is partly intended to provide a
consistent and TEI-conformant way of representing the results of such readings, in particular thoseconcerned with linguistic features. Its primary goal is to represent in a standard way additional
layers of annotation of particular importance to distant reading applications such as stylometry or
topic modeling. Enrichment of each lexical token to indicate its morpho-syntactic category (partof speech: POS) or its lemma and identication of tokens which refer to named entities are bothwell within the scope of existing text-processing techniques, and are also routinely used in distantreading applications. The challenge is that the input and the output formats typically used bysuch tools are rarely XML-based, and seem supercially to have a model of text quite dierent
from that of the “ordered hierarchy of content objects” in terms of which the TEI community
traditionally operates. For many in the distant reading community (it seems), a text is little morethan a sequence of tokens, mostly corresponding with orthographically dened words, though
there is some variability in the principles underlying the process of tokenization, for example inthe modeling of clitics or compound forms. Each token has a number of properties, which might
include such attributes as its part of speech, its lemma, or its position in the sequence of tokens
making up the document. Information such as its rendition or its status as part of a dialogue or
narrative, which in a more faithful XML model would be represented as properties of some higher
level construct, may also sometimes be modeled as a property of the token itself.
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19

If a community is dened by its tools, it would appear that the distant reading community has
not fully embraced the notion of XML as anything other than a rather verbose archival format.
However, communities are not dened solely by their tools: by seeking a way of reconciling thesediering views of what text really is in a spirit of comity we hope to demonstrate that there areadvantages both for the distant reader or stylometrician and for the literary analyst or textual
editor.

20

At ELTeC level2, all existing elements are retained and two new elements, 
 and <w>, areintroduced to support segmentation of running text into sentence-like and word-like sequences
respectively. Individual tokens are marked using the <w> element and decorated with one or moreof the TEI-dened linguistic attributes @pos @lemma and @join Both words and punctuation marks
are considered to be “tokens” in this sense, although the TEI recommends distinguishing the twocases using <w> and <pc> respectively. On this occasion, we have preferred a reduction in thenumber of choices for the encoder to a strict adherence to TEI semantics. The 
 (segment)element is used to provide an end-to-end tessellating segmentation of the whole sequence of <w>
elements, based on orthographic form. This provides a convenient extension of the existing textbody-div hierarchy within which tokens are located.

21

The elements <p>, <head>, and <l> (which at levels 0 and 1 contain only text) at level 2 can containa sequence of 
 elements. Elements <gap>, <milestone>, <pb>, and <ref> are also permitted
within text content at any point, but these are disregarded when segmentation is carried out.8 Each
 element can contain a sequence of <w> elements, either directly or wrapped in one of the sub-paragraph elements <corr>, <emph>, <foreign>, <hi>, <label>, <title>. To this list we add theelement <rs> (referring string), provided by the TEI for the encoding of any form of entity name,such as a Named Entity Recognition procedure might produce.
22

This approach implies that <w> elements may appear at two levels in the hierarchy, which may
upset some software; it also implies that <w> elements must be properly contained within oneof these sub-paragraph elements, without overlap. If either issue proves to be a major stumbling
block, an alternative would be to remove the tags demarcating these sub-paragraph elements,
indicating their semantics instead by additional attribute values on the <w> elements they contain.

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23

This TEI XML format is equally applicable to the production of training data for applications using
machine learning techniques and to the outputs of such systems. However, since such machinelearning applications typically operate on text content in a tabular format only, we envisage XSLTlters which transform (or generate) the XML markup discussed here from such tabular formats
without loss of information. At the time of writing, however, Working Group 2 has yet to put this
proposed architecture to the test.

4. ELTeC Metadata and Corpus Design24

Like every other TEI document, every ELTeC text has a TEI Header, though for the reasons alreadymentioned its organization and content are both constrained much more tightly than is common
TEI praxis. The structure of an ELTeC Header is the same no matter what level of encoding
applies to the text. It provides minimal bibliographic information about the encoded text andits source, sucient to identify the text and its author, in a xed and consistent format. It is
assumed that if more detailed bibliographic information is required, for example about the author
or work encoded, it is better obtained from standard authority les; to that end a VIAF (VirtualInternational Authority File) code may be associated with the title and author in the TEI header.

25

As noted above, ELTeC texts may be derived from many sources, each of which should be
documented correctly in the header’s <sourceDesc> element. After some debate, a common setof practices has been identied to distinguish (for example) ELTeC texts derived directly from aprint source from those derived from a digital source, itself derived from a known print source,
and to provide information about each source. In the following example, the source of the ELTeC
version is a preexisting digital edition provided by Project Gutenberg, but the source description
also provides information about the rst print edition of the work concerned.
*example-label* 1. A preexisting digital edition provided by Project Gutenberg as source of the ELTeC version.
<bibl type="digitalSource"> <title>Project Gutenberg EBook A
engomadeira de Almada Negreiros</title> <ref target="http://www.gutenberg.org/
ebooks/23879"/> </bibl><bibl type="firstEdition"> <title>A engomadeira</title> <author>José de Almada
Negreiros</author><publisher>Typographia Monteiro &amp; Cardoso</publisher> <date>1917</date> </bibl>

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

26

In most cases, the ELTeC text will correspond with the rst edition of a work in book form; but even
where this is not the case, or where information about the precise source used is not available,
minimal information about that rst edition should also be provided in order to place the workin its original temporal context.

27

As with other TEI-conformant documents, beside the mandatory le description, the TEI headerof every ELTeC text contains a publication statement which species its licensing conditions (alltexts included in the ELTeC corpora are in the public domain; the textual markup is provided witha Creative Commons Attribution [CC BY] licence); an encoding statement specifying the level of
encoding used; and a revision description containing versioning information. The TEI header isalso used to provide metadata describing the associated text in a standardized form; this is heldin the <profileDesc> element, which must specify the languages used by the text, may optionally
include a <textClass> element containing any culture-specic keywords considered useful todescribe the text, and must contain a <textDesc> element which documents the text’s status withrespect to selection criteria discussed below.

28

One of the knottier problems or (to be positive) more distinctive features of an ELTeC corpus isthat it is not intended to be an ad hoc accidentally constructed collection but a designed corpus.
Its composition is determined not by the happenstance of whatever we can get our hands on, but
is instead defensible, at least in theory, as a principled and representative selection.

29

The big question is, of course, representative of what.

30

It would be nice to say that it represents the production of novels in a specic language during a
specied historical period (1840–1920) throughout Europe. WG1 has working denitions for bothnovels and Europe which we do not discuss further here, though both are clearly problematic
terms. It is hoped that the ELTeC will provide data for an empirical discussion of such terms, feeding
into the work of WG3 on literary theory and terminology.

31

But we cannot make that claim without any data about the population we are claiming to represent—which is hard to come by for many of the languages concerned. We know about the novels
which we know about, which tend to be the ones that national libraries or equivalent cultural
heritage institutions have chosen to preserve, which publishers over time have been able to sell,
and which lecturers in literary studies have chosen to teach. More ephemeral titles may have beencollected (for example, by a copyright library), but equally well may have been discarded or even
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suppressed as unworthy of inclusion in the national patrimony. Titles and authors alike can go in
and out of fashion. But how can we express opinions about changes in the nature of the publishednovel if the sample on which we base those opinions is wildly dierent in composition from theactual population? If our data leads us to assert that novels in a given language are never written
by women, or are never of fewer than one hundred thousand words, is this simply because no
female authors happen to have been preserved, or because short novels were routinely discarded
from the collection? Or, on the other hand, does this actually indicate something fundamental, acharacteristic of the population we are investigating? This matters particularly for ELTeC, one of
the goals of which is precisely to facilitate cross-language comparisons.
32

This problem of representativeness is of course one which every corpus linguist has to face, anddiscussions of its implications are easy to nd in the literature.9

33

Our approach is to sidestep the impossibility of representing an unknown (and sometimes
unknowable) population by attempting instead to represent the range of possible variation in thevalues of a predened set of variables (metadata), each corresponding with a more or less objective
category of information available for all members of the population. To take a trivial example,
every novel can be characterized as short, medium, or long; there is no possible fourth value forthis category unless we revise our denition of length (elastic? unknown? instantaneous?). So, asa working hypothesis, we might say that a corpus in which roughly a third of the titles are short,a third are long, and a third are medium will represent the variation possible for this category. If
we apply this principle uniformly across all our corpora, we can reliably investigate (for example)
cross-language variation in some other observable phenomenon (say a fondness for syntacticallycomplex sentences) with respect to length. But note that we have made absolutely no claim about
whether novel length in the underlying population is also divided in this way.

34

The decade in which a novel rst appears in book form is a similarly objectively characteristic,
which in principle we can determine for every member of the population. We can also classify
every title according to the actual sex of their author(s) (with values such as female, male, mixed,
unknown). And we can likewise classify a title in terms of its staying power or persistence bylooking at the number of times it has been reprinted over a particular period. We suggest thattexts which have been frequently reprinted over a long period may reasonably be considered

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 14, 08/07/2021
Selected Papers from the 2019 TEI Conference12In search of comity: TEI for distant reading“canonical” in some sense of that vexed term. The goal of our corpus-balancing exercise is toensure more or less equal time for each possible value for each of these four categories—size,
decade, author sex, and reprint count.
35

Ideally, each corpus should have similar gures not just for each value, but for each combinationof values (text proportion within each corpus): so, for example, looking at the third of all titles
which are characterized as “short,” there should be roughly equal numbers for each decade of rst
appearance, roughly equal numbers by male and female authors, and so on. This may however
be a counsel of perfection. It is already apparent that for some languages, it is very dicult tond any texts at all within some time periods, or by female authors. Similarly, our denitionsof short (ten to fty thousand words), medium (fty to one hundred thousand words), and long(over one hundred thousand words), though objective and easy to validate, assumes that there
will be enough novels of a given length in the underlying population for us to extract a balanced
sample; but in some languages it may be that the distribution of lengths across the population isentirely dierent. We cannot tell whether (for example) the absence of any “long” novels at all inCzech, Serbian, or Norwegian is characteristic of those languages, or an artifact of the selection
process. Another diculty is that our corpus design deliberately seeks to include some forgotten or
marginal works along with well-known canonical texts: this is relatively easy for traditions such as
English, French, or German where copyright laws have led to the maintenance and documentationof large national collections, but less so for other less well-documented languages. The ELTeC
Summary Page (produced April 9, 2021, http://distantreading.github.io/ELTeC/) gives gures forthe current state of each ELTeC corpus, but of course does not provide data about the populations
from which those corpora have been selected.10

36

To encode these balance criteria in the TEI header in as direct and accessible a manner as possible,
we have chosen to repurpose the little-used <textDesc> element, originally provided by the TEI
as a wrapper for a set of so-called situational parameters proposed by corpus linguists as a wayof objectively characterizing linguistic production.11 In our case, we replace the TEI’s suggested
vocabulary for these parameters with a vocabulary representing our four criteria, expressed as
new non-TEI elements in the ELTeC namespace. These elements (<eltec:sex>, <eltec:size>,<eltec:reprintCount>, and <eltec:timeSlot>) are required by the ELTeC schemas and have an

attribute @key which supplies a coded value for the criterion concerned taken from a predened
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In search of comity: TEI for distant readingclosed list. So, for example, a long (over 100,000 words) novel by a female author rst publishedbetween 1881 and 1900 but only infrequently reprinted thereafter might have a text description
like the following:*example-label* 2. New non-TEI elements in the ELTeC namespace.
<textDesc xmlns:eltec="http://distant-reading.net/ns"><eltec:authorGender key="F"/><eltec:reprintCount key="low"/><eltec:size key="long"/><eltec:timeSlot key="T3"/></textDesc>

37

When complete, this information can be used to select subcorpora from the corpus as a whole,thus permitting more delicate cross-linguistic comparisons: for example between the lexis of maleand female writers, or between the stylistic features typically associated with long or short texts.
During the construction phase, these coded values also make it easy to monitor the emerging
composition of the corpus, for example to detect whether or not the ratio of male to female writers
is consistent across dierent time periods, by means of a simple visualization like that in *gurelabel* 1:

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading*ﬁgure-label* 1. ELTeC-eng Balance.

38

The columns of this “mosaic plot” show the proportion of long, medium, and short novels, while
the rows show the proportion of novels from each time slot, and the color shows the proportionof male/female authors. In this representation of the current state of the English corpus (onehundred texts) there are roughly as many female (blue) as male (pink) writers across the board, butthere is a preponderance of long texts, as shown by the greater width of the rst column. Moreover,by adding the numbers given within each row , we can quickly detect the preponderance of titles
published in time slot 3.

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading*ﬁgure-label* 2. ELTeC-hun Balance.

39

For comparison, in *gure-label* 2 the same plot for the current state of the Hungarian corpus (onehundred texts) shows signicantly fewer female writers, and a higher proportion of short texts.

5. Chaining ODDs
40

The TEI ODD (One Document Does it all) system (Rahtz and Burnard 2013) is widely used as ameans of customizing TEI and documenting the customization in a standard way. When only asingle ODD customization is used across a project, there is a natural tendency to produce broadly
permissive schemas, to allow for the inevitable variation of requirements when materials of
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Selected Papers from the 2019 TEI Conference16In search of comity: TEI for distant readingdierent kinds are to be processed in an integrated collection. But this prevents the encoder fromtaking full advantage of the ability of an XML schema to check that particular documents conformto predened rules, unless they are willing greatly to increase the complexity of their workow.
A better approach, pioneered by the Deutsches Textarchiv (Haaf and Thomas 2017), has been theuse of a technique known as ODD chaining (Burnard 2016). Here, a project rst denes a base ODD
which selects all the TEI components considered to be useful anywhere and then uses it as the basis
for smaller, more constraining, ODDs which select from the base only the components (or otherrules) specic to a subset of the project’s documentary universe. For example, an archive may haveidentied a common set of metadata it wishes to document across all of its holdings but also haveparticular metadata requirements for print and manuscript sources respectively. Simply dening
two dierent ODDs, one for print and one for manuscript, when many other components apply
to either kind of source, opens the door to redundant duplication and the risk of inconsistency.
The ODD-chaining approach requires the denition of a base ODD which contains the union of thecomponents needed for these two dierent ODDs, constructed as an appropriate selection fromthe full range of TEI components. The ODDs for print and manuscript are then dened as further
specializations or customizations of the base, ensuring thereby that the common components areused in a consistent manner, but preserving comity by allowing equal status to the two specialized
schemas.
41

In the ELTeC project, we begin by dening an ODD which selects from TEI all the components
used by any ELTeC schema at any level. This ODD also contains documentation and species usage
constraints applicable across every schema. This base ODD is then processed using the TEI standard
odd2odd stylesheet to produce a stand-alone set of TEI specications which we call eltec-library.
Three dierent ODDs, eltec-0, eltec-1, and eltec-2, then derive specic schemas and documentationfor each of the three ELTeC levels, using this library of specications as a base rather than using thewhole of the TEI. This enables us to customize the TEI across the whole project, while at the sametime respecting three dierent views of the resulting encoding standard. As with other ODDs, weare then able to produce documentation and formal schemas which reect exactly the scope ofeach encoding level.

42

The ODD sources and their outputs are maintained on GitHub and are also http://doi.org/10.5281/
zenodo.3546326published on Zenodo (Odebrecht et al. 2019) along with the ELTeC corpora.12
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6. State of Play and Future Work
43

The ELTeC is still very much a work in progress and hence we cannot report with any plausibility
that our design goals have been achieved. An initial release of the collection was published on
Zenodo in November 2019 (Odebrecht et al. 2019), with a rst major 1.0 release at the end of 2020.
We expect several future releases before the end of the project, as more language collections reachthe target of one hundred titles. As of this writing, seven collections (English, French, German,
Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, and Slovenian) have already achieved this goal, and a furtherve (Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish) are over halfway there. Four morecollections (Czech, Greek, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian) are currently under active development andare expected to become available during the coming year. As noted above, up-to-date information
about the current state of all corpora is publicly visible at http://distantreading.github.io/ELTeC/,
which includes links to the individual GitHub repositories for each corpus.

44

As well as continuing to expand the collection, and continuing to ne-tune its composition,
we hope to improve the consistency and reliability of the metadata associated with each text,
as far as possible automatically. For example, we have developed two complementary methodsof automatically counting the number of reprints for each title, one by screen-scraping fromWorldCat, and the other by processing data from a Z39.50 server where available. These methods
should provide more reliable data than have hitherto been available for the “reprintCount”
criterion mentioned above.

45

The main area of future work we anticipate is, however, in the testing of the proposed ELTeC level2 encoding and an evaluation of its usefulness. At a technical level, this may necessitate somechanges in the existing markup scheme, but of perhaps more interest is the extent to which its
availability will exemplify the virtue of striving for comity among the many ways in which TEI
XML markup can be applied.

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading*BIBLIOGRAPHY-LABEL*

References
Aston, Guy. 1988. “Learning Comity: An Approach to the Description and Pedagogy of Interactional Speech.”
Testi e discorsi: Strumenti linguistici e letterari 9. Bologna: CLUEB.
Biber, Douglas. 1993. “Representativeness in Corpus Design.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 8 (4): 243–57.
doi:10.1093/llc/8.4.243.
Bode, Katherine. 2018. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Burnard, Lou. 2016. “ODD Chaining for Beginners.” TEI Council Technical Working Paper. TEI GitHub IO
Repository. Available at http://teic.github.io/PDF/howtoChain.pdf.
———. 2019. “What Is TEI Conformance, and Why Should You Care?” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 12.
https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1777 doi:10.4000/jtei.1777.
Caton, Paul. 2013. “On the Term Text in Digital Humanities.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 28 (2): 209–20.
doi:10.1093/llc/fqt001.
DeRose, Steven J., David G. Durand, Elli Mylonas, and Allen H. Renear. 1990. “What Is Text, Really?” Journal ofComputing in Higher Education 1 (2): 3–26. doi:10.1007/BF02941632.
Gavin, Michael. 2017. “How to Think about EEBO.” Textual Cultures 11 (1–2) (published online June 11, 2019).
doi:10.14434/textual.v11i1-2.23570.
Haaf, Susanne, and Christian Thomas. 2017. “Enabling the Encoding of Manuscripts within the DTABf:
Extension and Modularization of the Format.” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 10. https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1650 doi:10.4000/jtei.1650.
Lüdeling, Anke. 2011. “Corpora in Linguistics: Sampling and Annotation.” In Going Digital. Evolutionary andRevolutionary Aspects of Digitization, edited by Karl Grandin, 220–43. Nobel Symposium 147. New York:
Science History Publications/USA.
Odebrecht, Carolin, Lou Burnard, Borja Navarro Colorado, Maciej Eder, and Christof Schöch. 2019. “TheEuropean Literary Text Collection ELTeC.” Poster, version 1, November 18. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/
zenodo.3546326.
Rahtz, Sebastian, and Lou Burnard. 2013. “Reviewing the TEI ODD System.” In DocEng 13: Proceedings of the 2013
ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 193–96. New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/2494266.2494321.
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Schöch, Christof, Roxana Patraș, Diana Santos, and Tomaž Erjavec. Forthcoming. “Creating the European
Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives.” Modern Languages Open. https://doi.org/
PreprintPreprint, May 7, 2021. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4742419.
TEI Consortium. 2021.TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Version 4.2.2. Last updated
April 9. N.p.: TEI Consortium. https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.2.2/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/.
van Zundert, Joris J., and Tara L. Andrews. 2017. “Qu’est-ce qu’un texte numérique? A New Rationale forthe Digital Representation of Text.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 (supplement 2): ii78–88.
doi:10.1093/llc/fqx039.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1990. Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*NOTES-LABEL*
1“Those participating in conversational encounters have to have a care for the preservation ofgood relations by promoting the other’s positive self-image, by avoiding oence, encouraging
comity, and so on. The negotiation of meaning is also a negotiation of social relations” (Widdowson
1990, 110).
2This project is a COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)

3

There is no authoritative single list of TEI projects, though the TEI Consortium website has formany years oered a platform for one: “Projects Using the TEI,” accessed May 17, 2021, https://teic.org/activities/projects/. More recently, the TEIhub project lists more than 12,500 GitHub-hosted
TEI projects (last updated May 11, 2021, https://teihub.netlify.app/); an associated bot called TEIPelican provides a daily twitter feed of new GitHub repositories containing a TEI header. We areunaware of any systematic analysis of the application types indicated by these data sources, but aglance gives the impression that traditional editorial and resource-building projects predominate.
4

Further information about the Action is available from its website at https://www.distant-reading.net/. For information about the organization and decision processes
see also the COST Vademecum, June 2019, https://www.cost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/
Vademecum-20062019-V7-.pdf.
5These and other documents are available from the Action’s GitHub page, accessed May 17, 2021,

https://distantreading.github.io/.

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In search of comity: TEI for distant reading

6

A large-scale project called MONK (Metadata Oer New Knowledge) demonstrated some of thetechnical consequences of this for integrated searching of TEI resources: see further the MONK
web page, last updated August 13, 2014, http://monk.library.illinois.edu/.
7

An exception is made for epistolary novels which contain only the representation of a sequenceof letters, with no other signicant content: these may be marked as <div type="letter">.
8

To facilitate this, any content within a <ref> element is discarded at level 2.

9Some notable examples include Biber 1993; Lüdeling 2011; Bode 2018.

10 For a further discussion of corpus composition in ELTeC, see Schöch et al. (forthcoming).
11 The<textDesc>

element is discussed in section 15.2.1 of the TEI Guidelines (TEI

Consortium 2021, “The Text Description,” https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.2.2/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/
html/CC.html#CCAHTD).
12 The GitHub repository for the ELTeC collection (last updated May 17, 2021) is found at https://github.com/COST-ELTeC/; the Zenodo community within which it is being published (last updated
April 11, 2021) lives at https://zenodo.org/communities/eltec/.

*AUTHOR-LABEL*SLOU BURNARD
Oxford University Computing Services
CHRISTOF SCHÖCH
Trier UniversityTrier Centre for Digital Humanities (TCDH)
CAROLIN ODEBRECHT
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

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