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L-70. XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts

Formerly titled Electronic Texts & Images

David Seaman


A practical exploration of the creation, preservation, and use of electronic texts and their associated images in the humanities, with a special focus on Special Collections materials.
This course is aimed primarily (although not exclusively) at librarians, publishers, and scholars keen to develop, use, publish, and control electronic texts for library, research, scholarly communication, or teaching purposes.
The week will center around the creation of a set of archival-quality etexts and digital images (probably 18th and 19th century letters, which are short enough to allow each participant to take an entire document through all its creation stages during the course).
Topics include: XML tagging and conversion; using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines; Unicode; metadata issues (including a discussion of METS and Open Archives Initiative harvesting), project planning and funding; and the manipulation of XML texts using stylesheets for re-publishing HTML, in ebook formats, and in PDF.
Applicants need to have some experience with the tagging of HTML documents.  Further XML experience welcomed. In their personal statement, they should assess the extent of their present knowledge of the electronic environment, and outline a project to which they hope to apply the skills learned in this course.

Course Resources

  • Preliminary Reading List
  • Evaluations for this course:

Course History

1994

David Seaman has taught this course at RBS many times since 1994.