TEI P5 Research Articles

Reconstructing the textual evolution of a medieval manuscript

This article presents the results of the work on kundige bok, one of Göttingen's town records, containing late medieval town law. Due to the fact that this law was frequently subject to change, the text itself was revised over and over again, giving evidence for its frequent use and its dynamic nature. What has come to us, is, thus, a multi-layered text in which all layers represent a different (e.g. chronological) stage of the town law. Consequently they have to be regarded, processed and represented equally. A dynamic text like this requires a dynamic representation. The article shows how an electronic scholarly edition of a multi-layered text can be created and used, first, to reconstruct the genesis of the text; second, to make this evolution understandable, processable and visible; and third, with the text as a witness to display the development of urban law and urban life in the Late Middle Ages. This article: outlines the challenge of editing a multi-layered medieval manuscript; discusses why this leads to a new understanding of a critical edition of such a text; and introduces the techniques used to create the electronic edition of kundige bok, in particular highlighting the linkage between the two dimensions of ‘text’and ‘time’ based on the TEI P5 scheme.

The making of TEI P5

The TEl Consortium has taken on the task of maintaining the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. This article describes how the latest major revision to these Guidelines was developed over the course of >6 years by the members of the TEI Technical Council and workgroups charged and overseen by the Council and gives background information and reasoning for the decisions taken. Among the new additions for P5, two of the most outstanding, the chapters on Names, Dates, People, and Places and on digital facsimiles are treated in some more detail. The article concludes with a brief account of the decisions made with respect to customization and conformance.

The TEIViewer: Facilitating the transition from XML to web display

This article addresses the need for TEI display tools. In order to illustrate the need for display tools, we begin with a brief review of the tools that are currently available, summarizing in particular those listed on the TEI Wiki Tools page. We then turn to a discussion of our work on the development of the TEIViewer (http://teiviewer.org), a simple, JavaScript-driven, portable display tool designed to facilitate the online representation of and interaction with elements and attributes described within select modules of the TEI P5 Guidelines and encoded as layers of data and metadata in TEI-XML documents. We explain how the TEIViewer works by describing the interactions between the XML source layer, the display layer generated via XSL, and the interactive layer powered by jQuery and CSS; and we explain why we chose the jQuery JavaScript library to manage the Viewer's functionality as well as the advantages of this decision. Finally we describe current implementations and plans for release.

TEI and cultural heritage ontologies: Exchange of information?

The content in information systems and virtual reconstructions in the cultural heritage sector is to a large degree directly based on information deduced from the study of texts. In many cases, even if the texts are available electronically, the links from the deduced facts to the original texts are not available and in many cases very costly to re-establish. Reproducibility of results is a core concept in text-based research as in all research. Thus, such links should be expressed explicitly in the systems and in accordance with the data standards developed in the fields of text encoding and conceptual modelling. To do this it is necessary to create a combined understanding of text encoding represented by the TEI guidelines and the understanding of conceptual models represented by initiatives like the CIDOC CRM and FRBR oo . In this article, we study a part of this complex by comparing the expressive power of the real world descriptions TEI P5 by mapping central parts of the CIDOC CRM onto TEI P5. It is clear that the TEI P5 has moved a great step in the direction towards an event-oriented model compared with TEI P4. Our use of CIDOC CRM as a yardstick shows that the expressive-ness of TEI P5 can be greatly improved by extending the scope of very restricted elements like the relation element and adding a few new elements to the TEI.

The TEI as luminol: Forensic philology in a digital age

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore forensic philology in the context of electronic text editing. Drawing primarily on the example provided by the development of a TEI P5 conformant edition of Hafgeirs saga Flateyings, an alleged Icelandic saga forgery attested in a single, unsigned eighteenth century paper manuscript, this discussion explains how literary, linguistic, and transmission-level interpretations can be employed to describe the saga text and to bear witness to its origin and transmission process. It further explains how encoding the metadata described in these interpretations beside the data described in (near)zero-level text can be accomplished without sacrificing the role of the manuscript as artefact and without sacrificing the appearance of the text as it occurs on the page.

P5-MS: A general purpose tagset for manuscript description

This article discusses the new manuscript description module in TEI P5, looking in particular at how and why it differs from its immediate predecessors, the proposals made by the MASTER project, and the TEI Medieval Manuscripts Description Work Group (TEI-MMSS).