Learn the TEI

Introducing the TEI Guidelines

This introduction provides an overview of the TEI Guidelines, describing their purpose and overall design, and addressing basic concepts of validity and TEI conformance.

Teach Yourself TEI

Although the TEI itself does not currently maintain any tutorials for learning TEI, the TEI community has produced a wide range of materials including online tutorials, materials used in teaching TEI workshops (some of which are held on a regular basis), and project documentation. The TEI maintains a listing of these materials and welcomes additions.

A Gentle Introduction to XML

The Gentle Introduction is one of the most often cited sections of the TEI Guidelines and has proven its usefulness as an introduction to the essentials of XML markup. It defines and describes elements, attributes, entities, validity, well-formedness, schemas and DTDs. While it is necessarily somewhat technical in nature, it is written for a non-specialist audience and provides an essential background for understanding how encoding languages like the TEI work.

Orientation to TEI P5 ODDs

The underlying expression of the TEI Guidelines is a document called an ODD (or One Document Does it all), so called because it constitutes a single source from which the P5 schemas, reference documentation, and Guidelines prose are derived. The ODD language (which is part of the TEI language itself) is also the language in which TEI customizations are written. This page lists resources to learn and work with the ODD language in order to produce TEI customizations, either working with the web-based Roma tool, or by writing TEI ODD code directly.

Bibliography

This bibliography of publications relating to the TEI provides further reading on the background, context, theory, and practice of TEI encoding.