“Straying Into This Wilderness” : A First Taste of TEI [0]

TEI for Actual Beginners

This semester, I am taking Digital Scholarly Editing, a new module created by Dr. Mark Sweetnam at Trinity College, Dublin. Eventually, I will produce a fully-encoded TEI project; however, step one is wetting my feet with a practice exercise. Learning to encode demands balance between theory and practice, like learning to ride a bike. You need to know to sit in the saddle, hold the handlebars, and push the pedals before you start, but no matter how hard you listen, advice like “brake slowly” just doesn’t mean anything until you are on the pavement with a skinned knee.[1] Initially, I spent a few weeks familiarizing myself with TEI and doing warm-up exercises. For those interested in getting started with TEI themselves, the next paragraph reviews the resources I used. If you want to read about TEI in practice, skip to the following section.

Of course, if you are creative about it, you can always skip a few steps. (Image courtesy of Joel Hagan/Wikimedia Commons.)