The Text Encoding Initiative at 10: Not Just an Interchange Format Anymore – But a New Research Community

Abstract

Mylonas and Renear introduce a volume of selected papers from The Text Encoding Initiative 10th Anniversary Conference, held at Brown University in November 1997. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), was launched in 1987 and sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics. It had as its original objective the development of an interchange language for textual data. This effort was completely successful and the TEI Guidelines are now widely accepted as the standard interchange format for textual data. Mylonas and Renear also note that the TEI has accomplished two other major achievements: it has produced a powerful new data description language (which is influencing the development of new WWW standards); and, most importantly, it has motivated the development of an entirely new research community, focused on understanding the role of text structure and markup in the use of emerging information technologies in culture, scholarship, and communication.