\title{Text Encoding Initiative publishes guidelines}
\author{}
\begin{Article}

\noindent
On May 16, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) published its
`Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.'
 
This report is the product of several years' work by over a hundred
experts in fields ranging from computational linguistics to Ancient
Greek literature. The Guidelines define a format in which electronic
text materials can be stored on, or transmitted between, any kind of
computer from a personal microcomputer to a university mainframe. The
format is independent of the proprietary formats used by commercial
software packages.
 
The TEI came into being as the result of the proliferation of mostly
incompatible encoding formats, which was hampering cooperation and reuse
of data amongst researchers and teachers. Creating good electronic texts
is an expensive and time-consuming business.   The object of the TEI was
to ensure that such texts, once created, could continue to be useful
even after the systems on which they were created had become obsolete.
This requirement is a particularly important one in today's rapidly
evolving computer industry.
 
To make them `future-proof', the TEI Guidelines use an international
standard for text encoding known as SGML, the Standard Generalized
Markup Language.  SGML was originally developed by the publishing
industry as a way of reducing the costs of typesetting and reuse of
electronic manuscripts but has since become widely used by software
developers, publishers, and government agencies.  It is one of the
enabling technologies which will help the new Digital Libraries take
shape.
 
The TEI Guidelines go beyond many other SGML applications currently in
use. Because they aim to serve the needs of researchers as well as
teachers and students, they have a particularly ambitious set of goals.
They  must be both easily extensible and easily simplified.  And their
aim is to specify methods capable of dealing with all kinds of texts, in
all languages and writing systems, from any period in history.
 
Consequently,  the TEI Guidelines provide recommendations not only for
the encoding of prose texts, but also for verse, drama and other
performance texts, transcripts of spoken material for linguistic
research, dictionaries, and terminological data banks.
 
The Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the documentation of
electronic materials, their sources, and their encoding. These
specifications will enable future librarians to catalogue electronic
texts as efficiently and reliably as they currently catalogue printed
texts.
 
The TEI Guidelines also provide optional facilities which can be added
to the set of basic recommendations.  These include methods for encoding
hypertext links, transcribing primary sources (especially manuscripts),
representing text-critical apparatus, analyzing names and dates,
representing figures, formulae, tables, and graphics, and categorizing
of texts for corpus-linguistic study.  The Guidelines also define
methods of providing linguistic, literary, or historical analysis and
commentary on a text and documenting areas of uncertainty or ambiguity.
 
 
The TEI Guidelines have been prepared over a six-year period with grant
support from the U.S.  National Endowment for the Humanities,
Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Union, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. The effort is largely the product of the
volunteer work of over a hundred researchers who donated time to share
their experience in using computers and to work out the specific
recommendations in the Guidelines.
 
The project is sponsored by three professional societies active in the
area of computer applications to text-based research: the Association
for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics,
which have a combined membership of thousands of scholars and
researchers worldwide.
 
Many projects in North America and Europe have already declared their
intention of applying the TEI Guidelines in the creation of the large
scale electronic textual resources which are increasingly dominating the
world of humanities scholarship.
 
The Guidelines are available in paper form or electronic form over the
Internet.  For more information contact the TEI editors by e-mail at
\texttt{tei@uic.edu} or \texttt{lou@vax.ox.ac.uk}. Orders may be
placed at the TEI offices in Chicago, Oxford or Chiba, addresses of
which follow:

\begin{quote}
\emph{In Europe:} TEI Orders, Oxford University Computing Services,\\
          13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK\\
          fax +44 865 273275\\
         \\
\emph{In East Asia:} Prof. Syun Tutiya, Department of Philosophy\\
          Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho Inage-ku\\
          Chiba 263, Japan\\
          fax: +81 43 290 2287\\
         \\
\emph{Rest Of World:}  C. M. Sperberg McQueen, University of Illinois at\\
         Chicago, Academic Computing Center (M/C 135), 1940 W. Taylor, \\
         Rm. 124, Chicago IL  60612-7352, USA   \\
         fax: +1 312 668 6834\\
\end{quote}
\end{Article}