Sunday, September 9, 2012

Reading #2



Nellhaus, T. (2001).  XML, TEI, and Digital Libraries in the Humanities.  Libraries and the Academy, 1(3), 257-277.

 The implications of the “new” language XML and accompanying encoding structure TEI in academic digital humanities libraries is contemplated.  The history of XML and TEI is discussed, including their origins in SGML.  Next, the differences between SGML and XML are illuminated through examining the basic concepts of XML, such as DTDs, author-defined tag sets, XSL and expanded linking.  The history and structure of TEI is described, including the significance of the independence of the TEI Header from the rest of the TEI document as a way to increase interoperability, for example, with the MARC record.  Due to the optional specialized tag sets offered by TEI, standard TEI markup makes it easier to describe a wide variety of documents more richly.  The conclusion is that XML and TEI have great potential to help build digital libraries in the humanities. 

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