P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange

TEI: The TEI Header and Its Components⚓︎2.1.1 The TEI Header and Its Components

The teiHeader element should be clearly distinguished from the front matter of the text itself (for which see section 4.5 Front Matter). A composite text, such as a corpus or collection, may contain several headers, as further discussed below. In the general case, however, a TEI-conformant text will contain a single teiHeader element, followed by a single text or facsimile element, or both.

The header element has the following description:

• teiHeader (TEI header) supplies descriptive and declarative metadata associated with a digital resource or set of resources.

As discussed above, the teiHeader element has five principal components:

• fileDesc (file description) contains a full bibliographic description of an electronic file.
• encodingDesc (encoding description) documents the relationship between an electronic text and the source or sources from which it was derived.
• profileDesc (text-profile description) provides a detailed description of non-bibliographic aspects of a text, specifically the languages and sublanguages used, the situation in which it was produced, the participants and their setting.
• xenoData (non-TEI metadata) provides a container element into which metadata in non-TEI formats may be placed.
• revisionDesc (revision description) summarizes the revision history for a file.

TEI: Types of Content in the TEI Header⚓︎2.1.2 Types of Content in the TEI Header

The elements occurring within the TEI header may contain several types of content; the following list indicates how these types of content are described in the following sections:

free prose

Most elements contain simple running prose at some level. Many elements may contain either prose (possibly organized into paragraphs) or more specific elements, which themselves contain prose. In this chapter's descriptions of element content, the phrase prose description should be understood to imply a series of paragraphs, each marked as a p element. The word phrase, by contrast, should be understood to imply character data, interspersed as need be with phrase-level elements, but not organized into paragraphs. For more information on paragraphs, highlighted phrases, lists, etc., see section 3.1 Paragraphs.

grouping elements

Elements whose names end with the suffix Stmt (e.g. editionStmt, titleStmt) and the xenoData element enclose a group of specialized elements recording some structured information. In the case of the bibliographic elements, the suffix Stmt is used in names of elements corresponding to the ‘areas’ of the International Standard Bibliographic Description.⁵ In the case of the xenoData element, the specialized elements are not TEI elements, but rather come from some other metadata scheme. In most cases grouping elements may contain prose descriptions as an alternative to the set of specialized elements, thus allowing the encoder to choose whether or not the information concerned should be presented in a structured form or in prose.

declarations

Elements whose names end with the suffix Decl (e.g. tagsDecl, refsDecl) enclose information about specific encoding practices applied in the electronic text; often these practices are described in coded form. Typically, such information takes the form of a series of declarations, identifying a code with some more complex structure or description. A declaration which applies to more than one text or division of a text need not be repeated in the header of each such text or subdivision. Instead, the decls attribute of each text (or subdivision of the text) to which the declaration applies may be used to supply a cross-reference to it, as further described in section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text.

descriptions

Elements whose names end with the suffix Desc (e.g. settingDesc, projectDesc) contain a prose description, possibly, but not necessarily, organized under some specific headings by suggested sub-elements.

TEI: The Title Statement⚓︎2.2.1 The Title Statement

The titleStmt element is the first component of the fileDesc element, and is mandatory:

• titleStmt (title statement) groups information about the title of a work and those responsible for its content.

It contains the title given to the electronic work, together with one or more optional statements of responsibility which identify the encoder, editor, author, compiler, or other parties responsible for it:

• title (title) contains a title for any kind of work.
• author (author) in a bibliographic reference, contains the name(s) of an author, personal or corporate, of a work; for example in the same form as that provided by a recognized bibliographic name authority.
• editor contains a secondary statement of responsibility for a bibliographic item, for example the name of an individual, institution or organization, (or of several such) acting as editor, compiler, translator, etc.
• sponsor (sponsor) specifies the name of a sponsoring organization or institution.
• funder (funding body) specifies the name of an individual, institution, or organization responsible for the funding of a project or text.
• principal (principal researcher) supplies the name of the principal researcher responsible for the creation of an electronic text.
• respStmt (statement of responsibility) supplies a statement of responsibility for the intellectual content of a text, edition, recording, or series, where the specialized elements for authors, editors, etc. do not suffice or do not apply. May also be used to encode information about individuals or organizations which have played a role in the production or distribution of a bibliographic work.
• resp (responsibility) contains a phrase describing the nature of a person's intellectual responsibility, or an organization's role in the production or distribution of a work.
• name (name, proper noun) contains a proper noun or noun phrase.

The title element contains the chief name of the electronic work, including any alternative title or subtitles it may have. It may be repeated, if the work has more than one title (perhaps in different languages) and takes whatever form is considered appropriate by its creator. Where the electronic work is derived from an existing source text, it is strongly recommended that the title for the former should be derived from the latter, but clearly distinguishable from it, for example by the addition of a phrase such as ‘: an electronic transcription’ or ‘a digital edition’. This will distinguish the electronic work from the source text in citations and in catalogues which contain descriptions of both types of material.

The electronic work will also have an external name (its ‘filename’ or ‘data set name’) or reference number on the computer system where it resides at any time. This name is likely to change frequently, as new copies of the file are made on the computer system. Its form is entirely dependent on the particular computer system in use and thus cannot always easily be transferred from one system to another. Moreover, a given work may be composed of many files. For these reasons, these Guidelines strongly recommend that such names should not be used as the title for any electronic work.

Helpful guidance on the formulation of useful descriptive titles in difficult cases may be found in chapter 25 of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2002–2005)) or another national cataloguing code.

The elements author, editor, sponsor, funder, and principal, are specializations of the more general respStmt element. These elements are used to provide the statements of responsibility which identify the person(s) responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of an item and any corporate bodies from which it emanates.

Any number of such statements may occur within the title statement. At a minimum, identify the author of the text and (where appropriate) the creator of the file. If the bibliographic description is for a corpus, identify the creator of the corpus. Optionally include also names of others involved in the transcription or elaboration of the text, sponsors, and funding agencies. The name of the person responsible for physical data input need not normally be recorded, unless that person is also intellectually responsible for some aspect of the creation of the file.

Where the person whose responsibility is to be documented is not an author, sponsor, funding body, or principal researcher, the respStmt element should be used. This has two subcomponents: a name element identifying a responsible individual or organization, and a resp element indicating the nature of the responsibility. No specific recommendations are made at this time as to appropriate content for the resp: it should make clear the nature of the responsibility concerned, as in the examples below.

Names given may be personal names or corporate names. Give all names in the form in which the persons or bodies wish to be publicly cited. This would usually be the fullest form of the name, including first names.⁶

TEI: The Edition Statement⚓︎2.2.2 The Edition Statement

The editionStmt element is the second component of the fileDesc element. It is optional but recommended.

• editionStmt (edition statement) groups information relating to one edition of a text.

It contains either phrases or more specialized elements identifying the edition and those responsible for it:

• edition (edition) describes the particularities of one edition of a text.
• respStmt (statement of responsibility) supplies a statement of responsibility for the intellectual content of a text, edition, recording, or series, where the specialized elements for authors, editors, etc. do not suffice or do not apply. May also be used to encode information about individuals or organizations which have played a role in the production or distribution of a bibliographic work.
• name (name, proper noun) contains a proper noun or noun phrase.
• resp (responsibility) contains a phrase describing the nature of a person's intellectual responsibility, or an organization's role in the production or distribution of a work.

For printed texts, the word edition applies to the set of all the identical copies of an item produced from one master copy and issued by a particular publishing agency or a group of such agencies. A change in the identity of the distributing body or bodies does not normally constitute a change of edition, while a change in the master copy does.

For electronic texts, the notion of a ‘master copy’ is not entirely appropriate, since they are far more easily copied and modified than printed ones; nonetheless the term edition may be used for a particular state of a machine-readable text at which substantive changes are made and fixed. Synonymous terms used in these Guidelines are version, level, and release. The words revision and update, by contrast, are used for minor changes to a file which do not amount to a new edition.

No simple rule can specify how ‘substantive’ changes have to be before they are regarded as producing a new edition, rather than a simple update. The general principle proposed here is that the production of a new edition entails a significant change in the intellectual content of the file, rather than its encoding or appearance. The addition of analytic coding to a text would thus constitute a new edition, while automatic conversion from one coded representation to another would not. Changes relating to the character code or physical storage details, corrections of misspellings, simple changes in the arrangement of the contents and changes in the output format do not normally constitute a new edition, whereas the addition of new information (e.g. a linguistic analysis expressed in part-of-speech tagging, sound or graphics, referential links to external data sets) almost always does.

Clearly, there will always be borderline cases and the matter is somewhat arbitrary. The simplest rule is: if you think that your file is a new edition, then call it such. An edition statement is optional for the first release of a computer file; it is mandatory for each later release, though this requirement cannot be enforced by the parser.

Note that all changes in a file considered significant, whether or not they are regarded as constituting a new edition or simply a new revision, should be independently noted in the revision description section of the file header (see section 2.6 The Revision Description).

The edition element should contain phrases describing the edition or version, including the word edition, version, or equivalent, together with a number or date, or terms indicating difference from other editions such as new edition, revised edition etc. Any dates that occur within the edition statement should be marked with the date element. The n attribute of the edition element may be used as elsewhere to supply any formal identification (such as a version number) for the edition.

One or more respStmt elements may also be used to supply statements of responsibility for the edition in question. These may refer to individuals or corporate bodies and can indicate functions such as that of a reviser, or can name the person or body responsible for the provision of supplementary matter, of appendices, etc., in a new edition. For further detail on the respStmt element, see section 3.12 Bibliographic Citations and References.

TEI: Type and Extent of File⚓︎2.2.3 Type and Extent of File

The extent element is the third component of the fileDesc element. It is optional.

• extent (extent) describes the approximate size of a text stored on some carrier medium or of some other object, digital or non-digital, specified in any convenient units.

For printed books, information about the carrier, such as the kind of medium used and its size, are of great importance in cataloguing procedures. The print-oriented rules for bibliographic description of an item's medium and extent need some re-interpretation when applied to electronic media. An electronic file exists as a distinct entity quite independently of its carrier and remains the same intellectual object whether it is stored on a magnetic tape, a CD-ROM, a set of floppy disks, or as a file on a mainframe computer. Since, moreover, these Guidelines are specifically aimed at facilitating transparent document storage and interchange, any purely machine-dependent information should be irrelevant as far as the file header is concerned.

This is particularly true of information about file-type although library-oriented rules for cataloguing often distinguish two types of computer file: ‘data’ and ‘programs’. This distinction is quite difficult to draw in some cases, for example, hypermedia or texts with built in search and retrieval software.

Although it is equally system-dependent, some measure of the size of the computer file may be of use for cataloguing and other practical purposes. Because the measurement and expression of file size is fraught with difficulties, only very general recommendations are possible; the element extent is provided for this purpose. It contains a phrase indicating the size or approximate size of the computer file in one of the following ways:

• in bytes of a specified length (e.g. ‘4000 16-bit bytes’)
• as falling within a range of categories, for example:
  • less than 1 Mb
  • between 1 Mb and 5 Mb
  • between 6 Mb and 10 Mb
  • over 10 Mb
• in terms of any convenient logical units (for example, words or sentences, citations, paragraphs)
• in terms of any convenient physical units (for example, blocks, disks, tapes)

The use of standard abbreviations for units of quantity is recommended where applicable, here as elsewhere (see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html).

TEI: Publication, Distribution, Licensing, etc.⚓︎2.2.4 Publication, Distribution, Licensing, etc.

The publicationStmt element is the fourth component of the fileDesc element and is mandatory. Its function is to name the agency by which a resource is made available (for example, a publisher or distributor) and to supply any additional information about the way in which it is made available such as licensing conditions, identifying numbers, etc.

• publicationStmt (publication statement) groups information concerning the publication or distribution of an electronic or other text.

It may contain either a simple prose description organized as one or more paragraphs, or the more specialised elements described below.

A structured publication statement must begin with one of the following elements:

• publisher (publisher) provides the name of the organization responsible for the publication or distribution of a bibliographic item.
• distributor (distributor) supplies the name of a person or other agency responsible for the distribution of a text.
• authority (release authority) supplies the name of a person or other agency responsible for making a work available, other than a publisher or distributor.

These elements form the model.publicationStmtPart.agency class; if the agency making the resource available is unknown, but other structured information about it is available, an explicit statement such as ‘publisher unknown’ should be used.

The publisher is the person or institution by whose authority a given edition of the file is made public. The distributor is the person or institution from whom copies of the text may be obtained. Where a text is not considered formally published, but is nevertheless made available for circulation by some individual or organization, this person or institution is termed the release authority.

Whichever of these elements is chosen, it may be followed by one or more of the following elements, which together form the model.publicationStmtPart.detail class

• pubPlace (publication place) contains the name of the place where a bibliographic item was published.
• address (address) contains a postal address, for example of a publisher, an organization, or an individual.
• idno (identifier) supplies any form of identifier used to identify some object, such as a bibliographic item, a person, a title, an organization, etc. in a standardized way.

  type	categorizes the identifier, for example as an ISBN, Social Security number, etc. Suggested values include: 1] ISBN; 2] ISSN; 3] DOI; 4] URI; 5] VIAF; 6] ESTC; 7] OCLC

• availability (availability) supplies information about the availability of a text, for example any restrictions on its use or distribution, its copyright status, any licence applying to it, etc.

  status

  (status) supplies a code identifying the current availability of the text.

• date (date) contains a date in any format.
• licence contains information about a licence or other legal agreement applicable to the text.

A resource may have (for example) both a publisher and a distributor, or more than one publisher each using different identifiers for the same resource, and so on. For this reason, the sequence of at least one model.publicationStmtPart.agency element followed by zero or more model.publicationStmtPart.detail elements may be repeated as often as necessary.

The date element used within publicationStmt always refers to the date of publication, first distribution, or initial release. If the text was created at some other date, this may be recorded using the creation element within the profileDesc element. Other useful dates (such as dates of collection of data) may be given using a note in the notesStmt element.

TEI: The Series Statement⚓︎2.2.5 The Series Statement

The seriesStmt element is the fifth component of the fileDesc element and is optional.

• seriesStmt (series statement) groups information about the series, if any, to which a publication belongs.

In bibliographic parlance, a series may be defined in one of the following ways:

• A group of separate items related to one another by the fact that each item bears, in addition to its own title proper, a collective title applying to the group as a whole. The individual items may or may not be numbered.
• Each of two or more volumes of essays, lectures, articles, or other items, similar in character and issued in sequence.
• A separately numbered sequence of volumes within a series or serial.

A seriesStmt element may contain a prose description or one or more of the following more specific elements:

• title (title) contains a title for any kind of work.
• idno (identifier) supplies any form of identifier used to identify some object, such as a bibliographic item, a person, a title, an organization, etc. in a standardized way.
• respStmt (statement of responsibility) supplies a statement of responsibility for the intellectual content of a text, edition, recording, or series, where the specialized elements for authors, editors, etc. do not suffice or do not apply. May also be used to encode information about individuals or organizations which have played a role in the production or distribution of a bibliographic work.
• resp (responsibility) contains a phrase describing the nature of a person's intellectual responsibility, or an organization's role in the production or distribution of a work.
• name (name, proper noun) contains a proper noun or noun phrase.

The idno may be used to supply any identifying number associated with the item, including both standard numbers such as an ISSN and particular issue numbers. (Arabic numerals separated by punctuation are recommended for this purpose: 6.19.33, for example, rather than VI/xix:33). Its type attribute is used to categorize the number further, taking the value ISSN for an ISSN for example. Multiple seriesStmt elements may be supplied if the TEI document is associated with more than one series.

TEI: The Notes Statement⚓︎2.2.6 The Notes Statement

The notesStmt element is the sixth component of the fileDesc element and is optional. If used, it contains one or more note elements, each containing a single piece of descriptive information of the kind treated as ‘general notes’ in traditional bibliographic descriptions.

• notesStmt (notes statement) collects together any notes providing information about a text additional to that recorded in other parts of the bibliographic description.
• note (note) contains a note or annotation.

Some information found in the notes area in conventional bibliography has been assigned specific elements in these Guidelines; in particular the following items should be tagged as indicated, rather than as general notes:

• the nature, scope, artistic form, or purpose of the file; also the genre or other intellectual category to which it may belong: e.g. ‘Text types: newspaper editorials and reportage, science fiction, westerns, and detective stories’. These should be formally described within the profileDesc element (section 2.4 The Profile Description).
• an abstract or summary of the content of a document which has been supplied by the encoder because no such abstract forms part of the content of the source. This should be supplied in the abstract element within the profileDesc element (section 2.4 The Profile Description).
• summary description providing a factual, non-evaluative account of the subject content of the file: e.g. ‘Transcribes interviews on general topics with native speakers of English in 17 cities during the spring and summer of 1963.’ These should also be formally described within the profileDesc element (section 2.4 The Profile Description).
• bibliographic details relating to the source or sources of an electronic text: e.g. ‘Transcribed from the Norton facsimile of the 1623 Folio’. These should be formally described in the sourceDesc element (section 2.2.7 The Source Description).
• further information relating to publication, distribution, or release of the text, including sources from which the text may be obtained, any restrictions on its use or formal terms on its availability. These should be placed in the appropriate division of the publicationStmt element (section 2.2.4 Publication, Distribution, Licensing, etc.).
• publicly documented numbers associated with the file: e.g. ‘ICPSR study number 1803’ or ‘Oxford Text Archive text number 1243’. These should be placed in an idno element within the appropriate division of the publicationStmt element. International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN), International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN), and other internationally agreed upon standard numbers that uniquely identify an item, should be treated in the same way, rather than as specialized bibliographic notes.

Nevertheless, the notesStmt element may be used to record potentially significant details about the file and its features, e.g.:

• dates, when they are relevant to the content or condition of the computer file: e.g. ‘manual dated 1983’, ‘Interview wave I: Apr. 1989; wave II: Jan. 1990’
• names of persons or bodies connected with the technical production, administration, or consulting functions of the effort which produced the file, if these are not named in statements of responsibility in the title or edition statements of the file description: e.g. ‘Historical commentary provided by Mark Cohen’
• availability of the file in an additional medium or information not already recorded about the availability of documentation: e.g. ‘User manual is loose-leaf in eleven paginated sections’
• language of work and abstract, if not encoded in the langUsage element, e.g. ‘Text in English with summaries in French and German’
• The unique name assigned to a serial by the International Serials Data System (ISDS), if not encoded in an idno
• lists of related publications, either describing the source itself, or concerned with the creation or use of the electronic work, e.g. ‘Texts used in Burrows (1987)’

TEI: The Source Description⚓︎2.2.7 The Source Description

The sourceDesc element is the seventh and final component of the fileDesc element. It is a mandatory element and is used to record details of the source or sources from which a computer file is derived. This might be a printed text or manuscript, another computer file, an audio or video recording of some kind, or a combination of these. An electronic file may also have no source, if what is being catalogued is an original text created in electronic form.

• sourceDesc (source description) describes the source(s) from which an electronic text was derived or generated, typically a bibliographic description in the case of a digitized text, or a phrase such as "born digital" for a text which has no previous existence.

Alternatively, it may contain elements drawn from the following three classes:

• model.biblLike groups elements containing a bibliographic description.

  bibl	(bibliographic citation) contains a loosely-structured bibliographic citation of which the sub-components may or may not be explicitly tagged.
  biblFull	(fully-structured bibliographic citation) contains a fully-structured bibliographic citation, in which all components of the TEI file description are present.
  biblStruct	(structured bibliographic citation) contains a structured bibliographic citation, in which only bibliographic sub-elements appear and in a specified order.
  listBibl	(citation list) contains a list of bibliographic citations of any kind.
  msDesc	(manuscript description) contains a description of a single identifiable manuscript or other text-bearing object such as an early printed book.

• model.sourceDescPart groups elements which may be used inside sourceDesc and appear multiple times.

  recordingStmt	(recording statement) describes a set of recordings used as the basis for transcription of a spoken text.
  scriptStmt	(script statement) contains a citation giving details of the script used for a spoken text.

• model.listLike groups list-like elements.

  list	(list) contains any sequence of items organized as a list.
  listApp	(list of apparatus entries) contains a list of apparatus entries.
  listEvent	(list of events) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides information about an identifiable event.
  listNym	(list of canonical names) contains a list of nyms, that is, standardized names for any thing.
  listObject	(list of objects) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides information about an identifiable physical object.
  listOrg	(list of organizations) contains a list of elements, each of which provides information about an identifiable organization.
  listPerson	(list of persons) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides information about an identifiable person or a group of people, for example the participants in a language interaction, or the people referred to in a historical source.
  listPlace	(list of places) contains a list of places, optionally followed by a list of relationships (other than containment) defined amongst them.
  listRelation	provides information about relationships identified amongst people, places, and organizations, either informally as prose or as formally expressed relation links.
  listWit	(witness list) lists definitions for all the witnesses referred to by a critical apparatus, optionally grouped hierarchically.
  table	(table) contains text displayed in tabular form, in rows and columns.

When the header describes a text derived from some pre-existing TEI-conformant or other digital document, it may be simpler to use the following element, which is designed specifically for documents derived from texts which were ‘born digital’:

• biblFull (fully-structured bibliographic citation) contains a fully-structured bibliographic citation, in which all components of the TEI file description are present.

For further discussion see section 2.2.8 Computer Files Derived from Other Computer Files.

When the module for manuscript description is included in a schema, this class also makes available the following element:

• msDesc (manuscript description) contains a description of a single identifiable manuscript or other text-bearing object such as an early printed book.

This element enables the encoder to record very detailed information about one or more manuscript or analogous sources, as further discussed in 10 Manuscript Description.

The model.sourceDescPart class also makes available additional elements when additional modules are included. For example, when the spoken module is included, the sourceDesc element may also include the following special-purpose elements, intended for cases where an electronic text is derived from a spoken text rather than a written one:

• scriptStmt (script statement) contains a citation giving details of the script used for a spoken text.
• recordingStmt (recording statement) describes a set of recordings used as the basis for transcription of a spoken text.

Full descriptions of these elements and their contents are given in section 8.2 Documenting the Source of Transcribed Speech.

A single electronic text may be derived from multiple source documents, in whole or in part. The sourceDesc may therefore contain a listBibl element grouping together bibl, biblStruct, or msDesc elements for each of the sources concerned. It is also possible to repeat the sourceDesc element in such a case. The decls attribute described in section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text may be used to associate parts of the encoded text with the bibliographic element from which it derives in either case.

The source description may also include lists of names, persons, places, etc. when these are considered to form part of the source for an encoded document. When such information is recorded using the specialized elements discussed in the namesdates module (13 Names, Dates, People, and Places), the class model.listLike makes available the following elements to hold such information:

• listNym (list of canonical names) contains a list of nyms, that is, standardized names for any thing.
• listOrg (list of organizations) contains a list of elements, each of which provides information about an identifiable organization.
• listPerson (list of persons) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides information about an identifiable person or a group of people, for example the participants in a language interaction, or the people referred to in a historical source.
• listPlace (list of places) contains a list of places, optionally followed by a list of relationships (other than containment) defined amongst them.

TEI: Computer Files Derived from Other Computer Files⚓︎2.2.8 Computer Files Derived from Other Computer Files

If a computer file (call it B) is derived not from a printed source but from another computer file (call it A) which includes a TEI header, then the source text of computer file B is another computer file, A. The five sections of A's file header will need to be incorporated into the new header for B in slightly differing ways, as listed below:

fileDesc

A's file description should be copied into the sourceDesc section of B's file description, enclosed within a biblFull element

profileDesc

A's profileDesc should be copied into B's, in principle unchanged; it may however be expanded by project-specific information relating to B.

encodingDesc

A's encoding practice may or (more likely) may not be the same as B's. Since the object of the encoding description is to define the relationship between the current file and its source, in principle only changes in encoding practice between A and B need be documented in B. The relationship between A and its source(s) is then only recoverable from the original header of A. In practice it may be more convenient to create a new complete encodingDesc for B based on A's.

xenoData

B is a new computer file, with a different source than A's source (namely, A). Thus it is unlikely that metadata from other schemes about A or its source can be copied wholesale to B, although there may be similarities.

revisionDesc

B is a new computer file, and should therefore have a new revision description. If, however, it is felt useful to include some information from A's revisionDesc, for example dates of major updates or versions, such information must be clearly marked as relating to A rather than to B.

This concludes the discussion of the fileDesc element and its contents.

TEI: The Project Description⚓︎2.3.1 The Project Description

The projectDesc element may be used to describe, in prose, the purpose for which a digital resource was created, together with any other relevant information concerning the process by which it was assembled or collected. This is of particular importance for corpora or miscellaneous collections, but may be of use for any text, for example to explain why one kind of encoding practice has been followed rather than another.

• projectDesc (project description) describes in detail the aim or purpose for which an electronic file was encoded, together with any other relevant information concerning the process by which it was assembled or collected.

TEI: The Sampling Declaration⚓︎2.3.2 The Sampling Declaration

A sampling declaration which applies to more than one text or division of a text need not be repeated in the header of each such text. Instead, the decls attribute of each text (or subdivision of the text) to which the sampling declaration applies may be used to supply a cross-reference to it, as further described in section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text.

TEI: The Editorial Practices Declaration⚓︎2.3.3 The Editorial Practices Declaration

The editorialDecl element is used to provide details of the editorial practices applied during the encoding of a text.

• editorialDecl (editorial practice declaration) provides details of editorial principles and practices applied during the encoding of a text.

It may contain a prose description only, or one or more of a set of specialized elements, members of the TEI model.editorialDeclPart class. Where an encoder wishes to record an editorial policy not specified above, this may be done by adding a new element to this class, using the mechanisms discussed in chapter 23.3 Customization.

Some of these policy elements carry attributes to support automated processing of certain well-defined editorial decisions; all of them contain a prose description of the editorial principles adopted with respect to the particular feature concerned. Examples of the kinds of questions which these descriptions are intended to answer are given in the list below.

correction

• correction (correction principles) states how and under what circumstances corrections have been made in the text.

  status	indicates the degree of correction applied to the text.
  method	indicates the method adopted to indicate corrections within the text.

Was the text corrected during or after data capture? If so, were corrections made silently or are they marked using the tags described in section 3.5 Simple Editorial Changes? What principles have been adopted with respect to omissions, truncations, dubious corrections, alternate readings, false starts, repetitions, etc.?

normalization

• normalization (normalization) indicates the extent of normalization or regularization of the original source carried out in converting it to electronic form.

  source [att.global.source]	specifies the source from which some aspect of this element is drawn.
  method	indicates the method adopted to indicate normalizations within the text.

Was the text normalized, for example by regularizing any non-standard spellings, dialect forms, etc.? If so, were normalizations performed silently or are they marked using the tags described in section 3.5 Simple Editorial Changes? What authority was used for the regularization? Also, what principles were used when normalizing numbers to provide the standard values for the value attribute described in section 3.6.3 Numbers and Measures and what format used for them?

punctuation

• punctuation specifies editorial practice adopted with respect to punctuation marks in the original.

  marks	indicates whether or not punctation marks have been retained as content within the text.
  placement	indicates the positioning of punctuation marks that are associated with marked up text as being encoded within the element surrounding the text or immediately before or after it.

Are punctuation marks present in the original source retained? Are they identified with the element pc, or implied by markup? If retained, how are they placed with respect to related elements? For example, do commas and periods appear inside or outside elements marking phrases and sentences?

quotation

• quotation (quotation) specifies editorial practice adopted with respect to quotation marks in the original.

  marks

  (quotation marks) indicates whether or not quotation marks have been retained as content within the text.

How were quotation marks processed? Are apostrophes and quotation marks distinguished? How? Are quotation marks retained as content in the text or replaced by markup? Are there any special conventions regarding for example the use of single or double quotation marks when nested? Is the file consistent in its practice or has this not been checked? See section 3.3.3 Quotation for discussion of ways in which quotation marks may be encoded.

hyphenation

• hyphenation (hyphenation) summarizes the way in which hyphenation in a source text has been treated in an encoded version of it.

  eol	(end-of-line) indicates whether or not end-of-line hyphenation has been retained in a text.

Does the encoding distinguish ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ hyphens? What principle has been adopted with respect to end-of-line hyphenation where source lineation has not been retained? Have soft hyphens been silently removed, and if so what is the effect on lineation and pagination? See section 3.2.2 Hyphenation for discussion of ways in which hyphenation may be encoded.

segmentation

• segmentation (segmentation) describes the principles according to which the text has been segmented, for example into sentences, tone-units, graphemic strata, etc.

How is the text segmented? If s or seg segmentation units have been used to divide up the text for analysis, how are they marked and how was the segmentation arrived at?

stdVals

• stdVals (standard values) specifies the format used when standardized date or number values are supplied.

In most cases, attributes bearing standardized values (such as the when or when-iso attribute on dates) should conform to a defined W3C or ISO datatype. In cases where this is not appropriate, this element may be used to describe the standardization methods underlying the values supplied.

interpretation

• interpretation (interpretation) describes the scope of any analytic or interpretive information added to the text in addition to the transcription.

Has any analytic or ‘interpretive’ information been provided—that is, information which is felt to be non-obvious, or potentially contentious? If so, how was it generated? How was it encoded? If feature-structure analysis has been used, are fsdDecl elements (section 18.11 Feature System Declaration) present?

An editorial practices declaration which applies to more than one text or division of a text need not be repeated in the header of each such text. Instead, the decls attribute of each text (or subdivision of the text) to which it applies may be used to supply a cross-reference to it, as further described in section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text.

TEI: The Tagging Declaration⚓︎2.3.4 The Tagging Declaration

The tagsDecl element is used to record the following information about the tagging used within a particular document:

• the namespace to which elements appearing within the transcribed text belong.
• how often particular elements appear within the text, so that a recipient can validate the integrity of a text during interchange.
• any comment relating to the usage of particular elements not specified elsewhere in the header.
• a default rendition applicable to all instances of an element.

This information is conveyed by the following elements:

• rendition (rendition) supplies information about the rendition or appearance of one or more elements in the source text.

  selector

  contains a selector or series of selectors specifying the elements to which the contained style description applies, expressed in the language specified in the scheme attribute.

• att.styleDef provides attributes to specify the name of a formal definition language used to provide formatting or rendition information.

  scheme	identifies the language used to describe the rendition.
  schemeVersion	supplies a version number for the style language provided in scheme.

• namespace (namespace) supplies the formal name of the namespace to which the elements documented by its children belong.
• tagUsage (element usage) documents the usage of a specific element within a specified document.

The tagsDecl element is descriptive, rather than prescriptive: if used, it simply documents practice in the TEI document containing it. The elements constituting a TEI customization file (discussed in chapter 22 Documentation Elements) by contrast document expected practice in a number of documents, and may thus be used prescriptively. If there is an inconsistency between the actual state of a document and what is documented by its tagsDecl, then the latter should be corrected. If there is an inconsistency between a document and what is required by the customization file, or a schema derived from it, then it will usually be the document that requires correction.

The tagsDecl element consists of an optional sequence of rendition elements, each of which must bear a unique identifier, followed by an optional sequence of one or more namespace elements, each of which contains a series of tagUsage elements, up to one for each element type from that namespace occurring within the associated text element. Note that these tagUsage elements must be nested within a namespace element, and cannot appear directly within the tagsDecl element.

• » 2.3.4.2 Tag Usage
• Home

TEI: Rendition⚓︎2.3.4.1 Rendition

The rendition element allows the encoder to specify how one or more elements are rendered in the original source in any of the following ways:

• using an informal prose description
• using a standard stylesheet language such as CSS or XSL-FO
• using a project-defined formal language

One or more such specifications may be associated with elements of a document in two ways:

• the selector attribute on any rendition element may be used to select a collection of elements to which it applies
• the global rendition attribute may be used on any element to indicate its rendition, overriding or complementing any supplied default value

The global rend and style attributes may also be used to describe the rendering of an element. See further 1.3.1.1.3 Rendition Indicators.

The content of a rendition element may describe the appearance of the source material using prose, a project-defined formal language, or any standard languages such as the Cascading Stylesheet Language (Bos et al. (eds.) (2011)) or the XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics which forms a part of the W3C's Extensible Stylesheet Language (Berglund (ed.) (2006)). A styleDefDecl element (2.3.5 The Default Style Definition Language Declaration) may be supplied within the encodingDesc to specify which of these applies by default, and it may be overridden for one or more specific rendition elements using the scheme attribute.

The recommended way to indicate a default rendition on one or more elements is to use the selector attribute together with the scheme attribute on rendition. For example, suppose that all paragraphs in the front of a text appear in a large font, with significant top and bottom margins, while paragraphs in the main body are in regular font size and have no top and bottom margins. The use of selector together with scheme provides an efficient way to specify the distinct styling for distinct contexts of the paragraph by means of CSS selectors:

<rendition scheme="css" selector="front p">
font-size: 110%;
margin-top: 0.5em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
</rendition>

⚓︎

<rendition scheme="css" selector="body p">
font-size: 100%;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
</rendition>

⚓︎

In the following extended example we consider how to capture the appearance of a typical early 20th century titlepage, such as that in the following figure:

bibliography

Elements for the encoding of the information on a titlepage are presented in 4.6 Title Pages; here we consider how we might go about encoding some of the visual information as well, using the rendition element and its corresponding attributes.

First we define a rendition element for each aspect of the source page rendition that we wish to retain. Details of CSS are given in Bos et al. (eds.) (2011); we use it here simply to provide a vocabulary with which to describe such aspects as font size and style, letter and line spacing, colour, etc. Note that the purpose of this encoding is to describe the original, rather than specify how it should be reproduced, although the two are obviously closely linked.

<styleDefDecl scheme="css"
 schemeVersion="2.1"/>
<!-- ... -->
<tagsDecl>
 <rendition xml:id="center">text-align: center;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="small">font-size: small;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="large">font-size: large;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="x-large">font-size: x-large;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="xx-large">font-size: xx-large</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="expanded">letter-spacing: +3pt;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="x-space">line-height: 150%;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="xx-space">line-height: 200%;</rendition>
 <rendition xml:id="red">color: red;</rendition>
</tagsDecl>

⚓︎

The global rendition attribute can now be used to specify on any element which of the above rendition features apply to it. For example, a title page might be encoded as follows:

<titlePage>
 <docTitle rendition="#center #x-space">
  <titlePart>
   <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#x-large">THE POEMS</hi>
   <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#small">OF</hi>
   <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#red #xx-large">ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE</hi>
   <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#large #xx-space">IN SIX VOLUMES</hi>
  </titlePart>
  <titlePart rendition="#xx-space">
   <lb/> VOLUME I.
  <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#red #x-large">POEMS AND BALLADS</hi>
   <lb/>
   <hi rendition="#x-space">FIRST SERIES</hi>
  </titlePart>
 </docTitle>
 <docImprint rendition="#center">
  <lb/>
  <pubPlace rendition="#xx-space">LONDON</pubPlace>
  <lb/>
  <publisher rendition="#red #expanded">CHATTO &amp; WINDUS</publisher>
  <lb/>
  <docDate when="1904" rendition="#small">1904</docDate>
 </docImprint>
</titlePage>

bibliography ⚓︎

When CSS is used as the style definition language, the scope attribute may be used to specify CSS pseudo-elements. These pseudo-elements are used to specify styling applicable to only a portion of the given text. For example, the first-letter pseudo-element defines styling to be applied to the first letter in the targeted element, while the before and after pseudo-elements can be used often in conjunction with the "content" property to add additional characters which need to be added before or after the element content to make it more closely resemble the appearance of the source.

For example, assuming that a text has been encoded using the q element to enclose passages in quotation marks, but the quotation marks themselves have been routinely omitted from the encoding, a set of renditions such as the following:

<rendition xml:id="quoteBefore"
 scheme="css" scope="before">content:
'“';</rendition>
<rendition xml:id="quoteAfter" scheme="css"
 scope="after">content:
'”';</rendition>

⚓︎

might be used to predefine pseudo-elements quoteBefore and quoteAfter. Where a q element is actually rendered in the source with initial and final quotation marks, it may then be encoded as follows:

<q rendition="#quoteBefore #quoteAfter">Four score and seven years
ago...</q>

⚓︎

TEI: The Reference System Declaration⚓︎2.3.6 The Reference System Declaration

The refsDecl element is used to document the way in which any standard referencing scheme built into the encoding works.

• refsDecl (references declaration) specifies how canonical references are constructed for this text.

It may contain either a series of prose paragraphs or the following specialized elements:

• citeStructure (citation structure) declares a structure and method for citing the current document.
• cRefPattern (canonical reference pattern) specifies an expression and replacement pattern for transforming a canonical reference into a URI.
• refState (reference state) specifies one component of a canonical reference defined by the milestone method.
• att.patternReplacement provides attributes for regular-expression matching and replacement.

  matchPattern	specifies a regular expression against which the values of other attributes can be matched.
  replacementPattern	specifies a ‘replacement pattern’, that is, the skeleton of a relative or absolute URI containing references to groups in the matchPattern which, once subpattern substitution has been performed, complete the URI.

• att.citeStructurePart provides attributes for selecting particular elements within a document.

  use	(use) supplies an XPath selection pattern using the syntax defined in Kay (ed.) (2017). The XPath pattern is relative to the context given in match, which will either be a sibling attribute in the case of <citeStructure> or on the parent <citeStructure> in the case of <citeData>.

Note that not all possible referencing schemes are equally easily supported by current software systems. A choice must be made between the convenience of the encoder and the likely efficiency of the particular software applications envisaged, in this context as in many others. For a more detailed discussion of referencing systems supported by these Guidelines, see section 3.11 Reference Systems below.

A referencing scheme may be described in one of four ways using this element:

• as a prose description
• as nested set of citation structure declarations
• as a series of pairs of regular expressions and XPaths
• as a concatenation of sequentially organized milestones

Each method is described in more detail below. Only one method can be used within a single refsDecl element.

More than one refsDecl element can be included in the header if more than one canonical reference scheme is to be used in the same document, but the current proposals do not check for mutual inconsistency.

TEI: The Classification Declaration⚓︎2.3.7 The Classification Declaration

TEI: The Geographic Coordinates Declaration⚓︎2.3.8 The Geographic Coordinates Declaration

The following element is provided to indicate (within the header of a document, or in an external location) that a particular coordinate notation, or a particular datum, has been employed in a text. The default notation is a string containing two real numbers separated by whitespace, of which the first indicates latitude and the second longitude according to the 1984 World Geodetic System (WGS84).

• geoDecl (geographic coordinates declaration) documents the notation and the datum used for geographic coordinates expressed as content of the geo element elsewhere within the document.

  datum

  supplies a commonly used code name for the datum employed. Suggested values include: 1] WGS84 (World Geodetic System); 2] MGRS (Military Grid Reference System); 3] OSGB36 (ordnance survey great britain); 4] ED50 (European Datum coordinate system)

TEI: The Unit Declaration⚓︎2.3.9 The Unit Declaration

When documents feature units of measurement that are not listed in the International System of Units, the unitDecl element may be used in the encoding description to provide definitions and information about their origins and equivalents.

• unitDecl (unit declarations) provides information about units of measurement that are not members of the International System of Units.

The unitDecl contains one or more unitDef child elements that serve to describe units of measure which may be marked in unit elements within the text.

• unitDef (unit definition) contains descriptive information related to a specific unit of measurement.
• unit contains a symbol, a word or a phrase referring to a unit of measurement in any kind of formal or informal system.
• conversion defines how to calculate one unit of measure in terms of another.

  fromUnit	indicates a source unit of measure that is to be converted into another unit indicated in toUnit.
  toUnit	the target unit of measurement for a conversion from a source unit referenced in fromUnit.
  from [att.datable.w3c]	indicates the starting point of the period in standard form, e.g. yyyy-mm-dd.
  to [att.datable.w3c]	indicates the ending point of the period in standard form, e.g. yyyy-mm-dd.
  notBefore [att.datable.w3c]	specifies the earliest possible date for the event in standard form, e.g. yyyy-mm-dd.
  notAfter [att.datable.w3c]	specifies the latest possible date for the event in standard form, e.g. yyyy-mm-dd.
  when [att.datable.w3c]	supplies the value of the date or time in a standard form, e.g. yyyy-mm-dd.

• att.formula provides attributes for defining a mathematical formula.

  formula

  A formula is provided to describe a mathematical calculation such as a conversion between measurement systems.

• att.locatable provides attributes for referencing locations by pointing to entries in a canonical list of places.

  where

  indicates one or more locations by pointing to a place element or other canonical description.

Within the unitDef, a conversion element may be used to store information relating to conversion between units. The conversion element holds a special pair of attributes, fromUnit and toUnit, which serve to indicate the direction of a calculation from one unit of measure (stored in fromUnit) to another (stored in toUnit). A mathematical calculation to define the relation between these units may be stored in formula, as shown in the following examples. The formula attribute takes a value expressed as an XPath expression, for which see Robie et al. (eds.) (2017). Among other things, this means that division must be expressed with ‘div’ as opposed to the more common forward slash (‘/’, U+002F), so as not to be confused with path navigation. The conversion element may also use attributes to store dates and date ranges as well as location(s) that specify when and where a conversion formula was applied.

TEI: The Schema Specification⚓︎2.3.10 The Schema Specification

The schemaSpec element contains a schema specification. When this element appears inside encodingDesc, it allows embedding of a TEI ODD customization file inside a TEI header; alternatively, this element may be used in the body of an ODD document. The use of ODD files, and their relationship to schemas, is described in detail in 22 Documentation Elements.

TEI: The Application Information Element⚓︎2.3.11 The Application Information Element

It is sometimes convenient to store information relating to the processing of an encoded resource within its header. Typical uses for such information might be:

• to allow an application to discover that it has previously opened or edited a file, and what version of itself was used to do that;
• to show (through a date) which application last edited the file to allow for diagnosis of any problems that might have been caused by that application;
• to allow users to discover information about an application used to edit the file
• to allow the application to declare an interest in elements of the file which it has edited, so that other applications or human editors may be more wary of making changes to those sections of the file.

The class model.applicationLike provides an element, application, which may be used to record such information within the appInfo element.

• appInfo (application information) records information about an application which has edited the TEI file.
• application provides information about an application which has acted upon the document.

  ident	supplies an identifier for the application, independent of its version number or display name.
  version	supplies a version number for the application, independent of its identifier or display name.

Each application element identifies the current state of one software application with regard to the current file. This element is a member of the att.datable class, which provides a variety of attributes for associating this state with a date and time, or a temporal range. The ident and version attributes should be used to uniquely identify the application and its major version number (for example, ImageMarkupTool 1.5). It is not intended that an application should add a new application each time it touches the file.

TEI: Creation⚓︎2.4.1 Creation

TEI: Language Usage⚓︎2.4.2 Language Usage

The langUsage element is used within the profileDesc element to describe the languages, sublanguages, registers, dialects, etc. represented within a text. It contains one or more language elements, each of which provides information about a single language, notably the quantity of that language present in the text. Note that this element should not be used to supply information about any non-standard characters or glyphs used by this language; such information should be recorded in the charDecl element in the encoding description (see further 5 Characters, Glyphs, and Writing Modes).

• langUsage (language usage) describes the languages, sublanguages, registers, dialects, etc. represented within a text.
• language (language) characterizes a single language or sublanguage used within a text.

  usage	specifies the approximate percentage (by volume) of the text which uses this language.
  ident	(identifier) Supplies a language code constructed as defined in BCP 47 which is used to identify the language documented by this element, and which is referenced by the global xml:lang attribute.

A language element may be supplied for each different language used in a document. If used, its ident attribute should specify an appropriate language identifier, as further discussed in section vi.1. Language Identification. This is particularly important if extended language identifiers have been used as the value of xml:lang attributes elsewhere in the document.

TEI: The Text Classification⚓︎2.4.3 The Text Classification

The textClass element is used to classify a text in some way.

• textClass (text classification) groups information which describes the nature or topic of a text in terms of a standard classification scheme, thesaurus, etc.

Text classification may be carried out according to one or more of the following methods:

• by reference to a recognized international classification such as the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Universal Decimal Classification, the Colon Classification, the Library of Congress Classification, or any other system widely used in library and documentation work
• by providing a set of keywords, as provided for example by British Library or Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
• by referencing any other taxonomy of text categories recognized in the field concerned, or peculiar to the material in hand; this may include one based on recurring sets of values for the situational parameters defined in section 15.2.1 The Text Description, or the demographic elements described in section 15.2.2 The Participant Description

The last of these may be particularly important for dealing with existing corpora or collections, both as a means of avoiding the expense or inconvenience of reclassification and as a means of documenting the organizing principles of such materials.

The following elements are provided for this purpose:

• keywords (keywords) contains a list of keywords or phrases identifying the topic or nature of a text.

  scheme

  identifies the controlled vocabulary within which the set of keywords concerned is defined, for example by a taxonomy element, or by some other resource.

• classCode (classification code) contains the classification code used for this text in some standard classification system.

  scheme

  identifies the classification system in use, as defined by, e.g. a taxonomy element, or some other resource.

• catRef (category reference) specifies one or more defined categories within some taxonomy or text typology.

The keywords element simply categorizes an individual text by supplying a list of keywords which may describe its topic or subject matter, its form, date, etc. In some schemes, the order of items in the list is significant, for example, from major topic to minor; in others, the list has an organized substructure of its own. No recommendations are made here as to which method is to be preferred. Wherever possible, such keywords should be taken from a recognized source, such as the British Library/Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data in the case of printed books, or a published thesaurus appropriate to the field.

If no authority file exists, perhaps because the keywords used were assigned directly by an author, the scheme attribute should be omitted.

Alternatively, if the keyword vocabulary itself is locally defined, the scheme attribute will point to the local definition, which will typically be held in a taxonomy element within the classDecl part of the encoding description (see section 2.3.7 The Classification Declaration).

The catRef element categorizes an individual text by pointing to one or more category elements using the target attribute, which it inherits from the att.pointing class. The category element (which is fully described in section 2.3.7 The Classification Declaration) holds information about a particular classification or category within a given taxonomy. Each such category must have a unique identifier, which may be supplied as the value of the target attribute for catRef elements which are regarded as falling within the category indicated.

In general, it is a matter of style whether to use a single catRef with multiple identifiers in the value of target or multiple catRef elements, each with a single identifier in the value of target. However, note that maintenance of a TEI document with a large number of values within a single target can be cumbersome.

The distinction between the catRef and classCode elements is that the values used as identifying codes are exhaustively enumerated for the former, typically within the TEI header. In the latter case, however, the values use any externally-defined scheme, and therefore may be taken from a more open-ended descriptive classification system.

TEI: Abstracts⚓︎2.4.4 Abstracts

TEI: Calendar Description⚓︎2.4.5 Calendar Description

The calendarDesc element is used within the profileDesc element to document objects referenced by means of either the calendar attribute on date or the datingMethod attribute on any member of the att.datable class.

• calendarDesc (calendar description) contains a description of the calendar system used in any dating expression found in the text.

This element may contain one or more calendar elements:

• calendar (calendar) describes a calendar or dating system used in a dating formula in the text.

TEI: Correspondence Description⚓︎2.4.6 Correspondence Description

The correspDesc element is used within the profileDesc element to provide detailed correspondence-specific metadata, concerning in particular the communicative aspects (sending, receiving, forwarding etc.) associated with an act of correspondence.

This information is complementary to the detailed descriptions of physical objects (such as letters) associated with correspondence acts, which are typically provided by the sourceDesc element.

• correspDesc (correspondence description) contains a description of the actions related to one act of correspondence.

The correspDesc element contains the elements correspAction and correspContext, describing the actions identified and the context in which the correspondence occurs respectively.

• correspAction (correspondence action) contains a structured description of the place, the name of a person/organization and the date related to the sending/receiving of a message or any other action related to the correspondence.

  type	describes the nature of the action. Suggested values include: 1] sent; 2] received; 3] transmitted; 4] redirected; 5] forwarded

• correspContext (correspondence context) provides references to preceding or following correspondence related to this piece of correspondence.

Many types of correspondence actions may be distinguished. The type attribute should be used to indicate the type of action being documented, using values such as those suggested above.