Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
Issue 5 | June 2013

TEI Infrastructures

Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue
Tobias Blanke and Laurent Romary

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/810
DOI: 10.4000/jtei.810
ISSN: 2162-5603
Publisher
TEI Consortium
Electronic reference
Tobias Blanke and Laurent Romary, « Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue », Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 5 | June 2013, Online since 20 June 2013, connection on 08 January
2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/810 ; DOI : 10.4000/jtei.810

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Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue

Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue
Tobias Blanke and Laurent Romary1

In recent years, European governments and funders, universities and academic societies
have increasingly discovered the digital humanities as a new and exciting field thatpromises new discoveries in humanities research. The funded projects are, however,often ad hoc experiments and stand in isolation from other national and international
work. What is lacking is an infrastructure to leverage these pioneering projects into
systematic investigations, with methods and technical environments that can be taken up
by others. The editors of this special issue are both directors of Digital Research
Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), which aims to set up a virtual
bridge between the many digital arts and humanities projects across Europe. DARIAH is
being developed with an understanding that infrastructure does not need to imply aseemingly generic and neutral set of technologies, but should be based upon
communities.

2DARIAH can learn from the successes and failures of such communities. The Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) has been one of the successes. It has emerged as the de facto
standard for online critical scholarly editions as well as a format that promotesinteroperability and exchange. Furthermore, the TEI as a community brings people
together in a concentrated dialogue about particular problems and challenges they faceand projects they can build together, such as an infrastructure to support TEI scholarship,
comprising workflows, support for collaborative encoding, and distributed annotation.
The TEI is therefore the perfect point of orientation for DARIAH to develop long-term
outlook European communities not just about scholarly editions but around people, data,and tools. The papers in this special issue very much reflect this community spirit anddemonstrate how new approaches and services can emerge through collaboration.

3

The first paper, by Timothy Allen, Clovis Gladstone and Richard Whaling ("PhiloLogic4:
An Abstract TEI Query System"), presents the method used by PhiloLogic, a reference
search engine for encoded textual documents, to adapt to the great variety of syntax andsemantics found in TEI documents. Based upon an internal abstract model for

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Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue

representing structural levels within XML documents, it provides an easy-to-customize
environment for users to extend the scope and complexity of document handling.
4A more TEI-centric approach is provided by the TAPAS project, presented by Julia
Flanders and Scott Hamlin ("TAPAS: Building a TEI Publishing and Repository Service").
The idea is to offer a generic repository service that is based on a core number of genericpublishing scenarios identified within the TEI user community. From an infrastructural
point of view, TAPAS wants to meet the needs of small projects that often do not have themeans to deploy their own repository environment.

5An additional level of complexity is offered in the next paper, "Islandora and TEI: Current
and Emerging Applications/Approaches," where Kirsta Stapelfeldt and Donald Moses
show how a Drupal- and Fedora-based digital object management system can be adapted
to deal with TEI documents and how a whole workflow, from digitization to complex
inline annotations, can be created within a coherent architecture. The authors reflect on
one of the key issues in processing TEI documents: managing precise encodings with thespecifics of OCR or NLP software (in this case, GATE).

6

Stepping back from an analysis of particular software, Quinn Dombrowski and Seth Denbo("TEI and Project Bamboo") analyze the impact that the widely deployed TEI Guidelines
and the corresponding user community have had on the development of Project Bamboo.
Conceived as a digital infrastructure project for the humanities, Bamboo addressedvarious forms of services, from technical components to generic guidelines for data
curation. By reviewing several experiments and activities carried out within the initial
phase of the Bamboo project, the authors demonstrate how the TEI Guidelines have been
seminal in understanding interoperability issues and therefore will continue to serve as
an essential basis for future text-based infrastructural initiatives in the humanities.

7In the next paper, Mark Hedges, together with several colleagues representing theTextGrid, TEXTvre, and DARIAH initiatives, discusses how infrastructures for textual
scholarship can be made sustainable and how the TEI, itself seen as an infrastructure, cancontribute to this idea. TextGrid was based on the TEI Guidelines from the start, followed
by TEXTvre; both from the beginning did not follow the model of generic repository
infrastructures but emphasized identifying the community characteristics of dedicatedtext-based virtual research environments. As examples of how to work together on tools
for editing, annotation, etc., these projects have inspired the European DARIAH
infrastructure to pay particular attention to how the TEI can offer services to the wider
community of digitally based research in the humanities.

8TEI as an infrastructure is indeed the best way to summarize the final paper of this special
issue ("The evolution of the Text Encoding Initiative: from research project to research
infrastructure"), where Lou Burnard provides a general overview of the historical,editorial, and technical developments of the TEI Guidelines over the last 25 years. LouBurnard shows in particular how the early customization principles included in the TEI
Guidelines, followed by the invention of the ODD specification language, helped
popularize data modeling in support of one's research objectives in the humanities.

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Editorial Introduction to the Fifth Issue

AUTHORSTOBIAS BLANKE
Tobias Blanke is the director of the MA in Digital Asset and Media Management. His academic
background is in philosophy and computer science. Tobias Blanke has played a leading role on
several multi-disciplinary research projects, mainly concerned with digital libraries andarchives, as well as infrastructures for research, particularly in the arts and humanities. Recently
completed research includes work on open-source optical character recognition; open linked
data and semantically enriched, intelligent digital content; scholarly primitives; and document
mining and information extraction for research. Tobias Blanke also continues earlier research on
new logic-based approaches to information science. He is on several international committees.
Most notably, he is one of the transition directors of DARIAH. He also leads the joint research
work for EHRI, a pan-European consortium to build a European Holocaust Research
Infrastructure.
LAURENT ROMARY
Laurent Romary is Directeur de Recherche for INRIA (France) and guest scientist at Humboldt
University (Berlin, Germany). He carries out research on the modeling of semi-structured
documents, with a specific emphasis on texts and linguistic resources. He received a PhD degree
in computational linguistics in 1989 and his Habilitation in 1999. He launched and directed theLangue et Dialogue team at Loria (Nancy, France) and participated in several national andinternational projects related to the representation and dissemination of language resources andto man-machine interaction, coordinating the MLIS/DHYDRO, IST/MIAMM, and eContent/Lirics
projects. He has been the editor of ISO standard 16642 (TMF – Terminological Markup
Framework) and is the chairman of ISO committee TC 37/SC 4 on Language Resource
Management, as well as member (2001–2007) then chair (2008–2011) of the TEI Council. In therecent years, he led the Scientific Information directorate at CNRS (2005–2006) and establishedthe Max-Planck Digital Library (Sept. 2006–Dec. 2008). He currently contributes to theestablishment and coordination of the DARIAH infrastructure in Europe as a transitional
director.

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