The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines are addressed to anyone who wants to interchange information stored in an electronic form. They emphasize the interchange of textual information, but other forms of information such as images and sound are also addressed. The Guidelines are equally applicable in the creation of new resources and in the interchange of existing ones.

The Guidelines provide a means of making explicit certain features of a text in such a way as to aid the processing of that text by computer programs running on different machines. This process of making explicit we call markup or encoding. Any textual representation on a computer uses some form of markup; the TEI came into being partly because of the enormous variety of mutually incomprehensible encoding schemes currently besetting scholarship, and partly because of the expanding range of scholarly uses now being identified for texts in electronic form.

The TEI Guidelines use the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to define their encoding scheme. SGML is an international standard (ISO 8879), used increasingly throughout the information processing industries, which makes possible a formal definition of an encoding scheme, in terms of elements and attributes, and rules governing their appearance within a text. The TEI's use of SGML is ambitious in its complexity and generality, but it is fundamentally no different from that of any other SGML markup scheme, and so any general-purpose SGML-aware software is able to process TEI-conformant texts.

The TEI is sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. Funding has been provided in part from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Communities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Its Guidelines were published in May 1994, after six years of development involving many hundreds of scholars from different academic disciplines worldwide.

At the outset of its work, the overall goals of the TEI were defined by the closing statement of a planning conference held at Vassar College, N.Y., in November, 1987; these Poughkeepsie Principles were further elaborated in a series of design documents. The Guidelines, say these design documents, should: suffice to represent the textual features needed for research; be simple, clear, and concrete; be easy for researchers to use without special-purpose software; allow the rigorous definition and efficient processing of texts; provide for user-defined extensions; conform to existing and emergent standards.

The world of scholarship is large and diverse. For the Guidelines to have wide acceptability, it was important to ensure that: the common core of textual features be easily shared; additional specialist features be easy to add to (or remove from) a text; multiple parallel encodings of the same feature should be possible; the richness of markup should be user-defined, with a very small minimal requirement; adequate documentation of the text and its encoding should be provided.

The present document describes a manageable selection from the extensive set of SGML elements and recommendations resulting from those design goals, which is called .

In selecting from the several hundred SGML elements defined by the full TEI scheme, we have tried to identify a useful starter set, comprising the elements which almost every user should know about. Experience working with TEI Lite will be invaluable in understanding the full TEI DTD and in knowing which optional parts of the full DTD are necessary for work with particular types of text.

Our goals in defining this subset may be summarized as follows: it should include most of the TEI core tag set, since this contains elements relevant to virtually all text types and all kinds of text-processing work; it should be able to handle adequately a reasonably wide variety of texts, at the level of detail found in existing practice (as demonstrated in, for example, the holdings of the Oxford Text Archive); it should be useful for the production of new documents as well as encoding of existing ones; it should be usable with a wide range of existing SGML software; it should be derivable from the full TEI DTD using the extension mechanisms described in the TEI Guidelines; it should be as small and simple as is consistent with the other goals.

The reader may judge our success in meeting these goals for him or herself. At the time of writing, our confidence that we have at least partially done so is borne out by its use in practice for the encoding of real texts. The Oxford Text Archive uses TEI Lite when it translates texts from its holdings from their original markup schemes into SGML; the Electronic Text Centers at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan have used TEI Lite to encode their holdings. And the Text Encoding Initiative itself uses TEI Lite, in its current technical documentation --- including this document.

Although we have tried to make this document self-contained, as suits a tutorial text, the reader should be aware that it does not cover every detail of the TEI encoding scheme. All of the elements described here are fully documented in the TEI Guidelines themselves, which should be consulted for authoritative reference information on these, and on the many others which are not described here. Some basic knowledge of SGML is assumed.

We begin with a short example, intended to show what happens when a passage of prose is typed into a computer by someone with little sense of the purpose of mark-up, or the potential of electronic texts. In an ideal world, such output might be generated by a very accurate optical scanner. It attempts to be faithful to the appearance of the printed text, by retaining the original line breaks, by introducing blanks to represent the layout of the original headings and page breaks, and so forth. Where characters not available on the keyboard are needed (such as the accented letter a in faàl or the long dash), it attempts to mimic their appearance.

CHAPTER 38 READER, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the par- son and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the knives, and I said -- 'Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning.' The housekeeper and her husband were of that decent, phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me; the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air, and for the same space of time John's knives also had rest from the polishing process; but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only -- 'Have you, miss? Well, for sure!' A short time after she pursued, 'I seed you go out with the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed'; and she basted away. John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear. 'I telled Mary how it would be,' he said: 'I knew what Mr Ed- ward' (John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet of the house, therefore he often gave him his Christian name) -- 'I knew what Mr Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long either: and he's done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, miss!' and he politely pulled his forelock. 'Thank you, John. Mr Rochester told me to give you and Mary this.' I put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the words -- 'She'll happen do better for him nor ony o' t' grand ladies.' And again, 'If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faa\l, and varry good-natured; and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see that.' I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and 474 JANE EYRE 475 Mary approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see me. 'She had better not wait till then, Jane,' said Mr Rochester, when I read her letter to him; 'if she does, she will be too late, for our honey- moon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.' How St John received the news I don't know: he never answered the letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr Rochester's name or allud- ing to my marriage. His letter was then calm, and though very serious, kind. He has maintained a regular, though not very frequent correspond- ence ever since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in the world, and only mind earthly things.

This transcription suffers from a number of shortcomings: the page numbers and running titles are intermingled with the text in a way which makes it difficult for software to disentangle them; no distinction is made between single quotation marks and apostrophe, so it is difficult to know exactly which passages are in direct speech; the preservation of the copy text's hyphenation means that simple-minded search programs will not find the broken words; the accented letter in faàl and the long dash have been rendered by ad hoc keying conventions which follow no standard pattern and will be processed correctly only if the transcriber remembers to mention them in the documentation; paragraph divisions are marked only by the use of white space, and hard carriage returns have been introduced at the end of each line. Consequently, if the size of type used to print the text changes, reformatting will be problematic.

We now present the same passage, as it might be encoded using the TEI Guidelines. As we shall see, there are many ways in which this encoding could be extended, but as a minimum, the TEI approach allows us to represent the following distinctions: Paragraph divisions are now marked explicitly. Apostrophes are distinguished from quotation marks. Entity references are used for the accented letter and the long dash. Page divisions have been marked with an empty pb element alone. To simplify searching and processing, the lineation of the original has not been retained and words broken by typographic accident at the end of a line have been re-assembled without comment. If the original lineation were of interest, as it might be for an important printing, it could easily be recorded, though it has not been here. For convenience of proof reading, a new line has been introduced at the start of each paragraph, but the indentation is removed.

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the knives, and I said ‐

Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning. The housekeeper and her husband were of that decent, phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me; the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air, and for the same space of time John's knives also had rest from the polishing process; but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only ‐

Have you, miss? Well, for sure!

A short time after she pursued, I seed you go out with the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed; and she basted away. John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear. I telled Mary how it would be, he said: I knew what Mr Edward (John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet of the house, therefore he often gave him his Christian name) ‐ I knew what Mr Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long either: and he's done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, miss! and he politely pulled his forelock.

Thank you, John. Mr Rochester told me to give you and Mary this.

I put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the words ‐

She'll happen do better for him nor ony o' t' grand ladies. And again, If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faàl, and varry good-natured; and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see that.

I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and Mary approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see me.

She had better not wait till then, Jane, said Mr Rochester, when I read her letter to him; if she does, she will be too late, for our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

How St John received the news I don't know: he never answered the letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr Rochester's name or alluding to my marriage. His letter was then calm, and though very serious, kind. He has maintained a regular, though not very frequent correspondence ever since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in the world, and only mind earthly things. ]]>

The decision to focus on Brontë's text, rather than on the printing of it in this particular edition, is one aspect of a fundamental encoding issue: that of selectivity. An encoding makes explicit only those textual features of importance to the encoder. It is not difficult to think of ways in which the encoding of even this short passage might readily be extended. For example: a regularized form of the passages in dialect could be provided; footnotes glossing or commenting on any passage could be added; pointers linking parts of this text to others could be added; proper names of various kinds could be distinguished from the surrounding text; detailed bibliographic information about the text's provenance and context could be prefixed to it; a linguistic analysis of the passage into sentences, clauses, words, etc., could be provided, each unit being associated with appropriate category codes; the text could be segmented into narrative or discourse units; systematic analysis or interpretation of the text could be included in the encoding, with potentially complex alignment or linkage between the text and the analysis, or between the text and one or more translations of it; passages in the text could be linked to images or sound held on other media.

The TEI-recommended way of carrying all of these out is described in the remainder of this document. The TEI scheme as a whole also provides for an enormous range of other possibilities, of which we cite only a few: detailed analysis of the components of names; detailed meta-information providing thesaurus-style information about the text's origins or topics; information about the printing history or manuscript variations exhibited by a particular series of versions of the text. For recommendations on these and many other possibilities, the full Guidelines should be consulted.

All TEI-conformant texts contain (a) a TEI header (marked up as a teiHeader element) and (b) the transcription of the text proper (marked up as a text element).

The TEI header provides information analogous to that provided by the title page of a printed text. It has up to four parts: a bibliographic description of the machine-readable text, a description of the way it has been encoded, a non-bibliographic description of the text (a text profile), and a revision history. The header is described in more detail in section .

A TEI text may be unitary (a single work) or composite (a collection of single works, such as an anthology). In either case, the text may have an optional front or back. In between is the body of the text, which, in the case of a composite text, may consist of groups, each containing more groups or texts.

A unitary text will be encoded using an overall structure like this: [ TEI Header information ] [ front matter ... ] [ body of text ... ] [ back matter ... ] ]]>

A composite text also has an optional front and back. In between occur one or more groups of texts, each with its own optional front and back matter. A composite text will thus be encoded using an overall structure like this: [ header information for the composite ] [ front matter for the composite ] [ front matter of first text ] [ body of first text ] [ back matter of first text ] [ front matter of second text] [ body of second text ] [ back matter of second text ] [ more texts or groups of texts here ] [ back matter for the composite ] ]]>

It is also possible to define a composite of TEI texts, each with its own header. Such a collection is known as a TEI corpus, and may itself have a header: [header information for the corpus] [header information for first text] [first text in corpus] [header information for second text] [second text in corpus] ]]> It is not however possible to create a composite of corpora -- that is, a number of teiCorpus elements combined together and treated as a single object. This is a restriction of the current version of the TEI Guidelines.

In the remainder of this document, we discuss chiefly simple text structures. The discussion in each case consists of a short list of relevant TEI elements with a brief definition of each, followed by definitions for any attributes specific to that element. In most cases, short examples are also given.

As indicated above, a simple TEI document at the textual level consists of the following elements: front contains any prefatory matter (headers, title page, prefaces, dedications, etc.) found before the start of a text proper. group contains a number of unitary texts or groups of texts. body contains the whole body of a single unitary text, excluding any front or back matter. back contains any appendixes, etc., following the main part of a text. Elements specific to front and back matter are described below in section . In this section we discuss the elements making up the body of a text.