What is the TEI Demonstrator?

The purpose of the DARIAH TEI Demonstrator (TD) is to demonstrate the practical benefits of using TEI for the representation of digital resources of all kinds, but primarily of original source collections within the arts and humanities. The Demonstrator aims to make it easy for humanities researchers to share TEI-encoded texts with others, and to compare their encoding practice with that of others in the TEI community. It also aims to show the "TEI Advantage", by showing how TEI can be used for textual materials in many languages, both for richly encoded complex materials and for minimally encoded basic texts.

1. Functionality

The TD uses a special purpose software platform, developed at the Max Planck Digital Library, which provides humanities researchers with the following functionality:

they can upload an existing TEI resource and associated materials to an online Repository;
they can integrate the metadata provided with their resource into the Repository database to facilitate cross-searching;
they can extract subsets ("collections") of documents (or document parts) from the Repository on the basis of intelligent searches across both metadata and content within the Repository;
they can download the results of searches across the Repository as new TEI documents for further analysis by other TEI tools;
they can upload a description of an existing TEI resource maintained elsewhere together with connectors which enable it to become a federated part of the Repository;

These facilities will be provided by a customised application of the eSciDoc digital library platform, developed by the Max Planck Digital Library team in Munich.

As well as providing an easy to use publication platform for TEI documents, the TEI Demonstrator will showcase the variety of TEI practice. For that reason, the TD will demonstrate clearly

how resources are constructed -- the XML markup should be visible as such, and its semantics should be documented (if varying from TEI)
what the XML markup does -- for example, it should facilitate alternative smart visualisations of the resource, it should facilitate intelligent searching of the resource

A "TEI Resource" here means

one or more XML documents marked up in TEI P5 XML and conforming to the TEI-all schema
optionally, a more restricted associated RelaxNG, W3C Schema, or DTD against which those documents are valid
a TEI P5-conformant ODD documentation file expressing the relation between that schema and the TEI framework
associated user-level documentation, tutorials etc. about the resource
associated stylesheets or other mappings/connectors

Not all of these components will necessarily be available in all cases.

2. Implementation

As noted above, the initial implementation of the TEI Demonstrator will use the eSciDoc platform. The first, pilot, phase of the project will provide access to a small set of documents selected in order to test the abilities of the platform to cope with the full variety of TEI texts. The texts initially available will be selected from those listed below. Some modifications may be made in the texts to ensure that they conform to the TEI-all schema, but in other respects the coding choices of the original encoders will be retained. We anticipate therefore that the Demonstrator will present a number of different perspectives on how specific encoding problems may be addressed.

At a later stage, registered users will be able to upload additional texts directly. It is planned to launch the project to internal DARIAH partners and collaborators by the end of May 2010, and to demonstrate it in public at the DARIAH conference planned for October 2010.

Texts for inclusion in the Demonstrator must be made available under the terms of a Creative Commons "CCBY" licence, permitting sharing and remixing, and requiring attribution.

Following an initial call for sample texts circulated to the TEI list in November 2009 (see initial texts offered), a small committee from the DARIAH WP7 group identified the following texts for inclusion in the pilot:

L'Est Republicain (a corpus of contemporary French newspaper text, supplied by the Centre Nationale des Ressources Textuelles et Linguistique
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (a 19th c. English children's book, originally digitized by Project Gutenberg, and converted into minimal TEI xml)
Champfleury (16th century french text, from the Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes)
S Poti (two versions of an early 20th c. Slovenian literary text, from the eZISS)
The Queen's Christmas Broadcasts 1952-2009 (a collection of public speeches in English, downloaded from the Royal website, converted into TEI, and enriched with an automatic morpho-syntactic analysis)
Die deutsche Turnkunst (an early 19th century German polemic text, from the Deutsches Textarchiv in Berlin)
P. Zen. Pestm (Ancient Greek and Demotic fragmentary texts from the Zenon Archive, from the EPIDOC community)
Drawings of Runestones (Multilingual transcription of manuscript describing and depicting a collection of runic monumental inscriptions, from the NFI
La Queste del Saint Graal (digital edition of 13th c French manuscript with linguistic analysis, from the Base de Français Médiéval project).
Actions and Reactions (a volume of 19th c. English short stories with minimal tagging)

Click on the title of each text listed above to download a zip archive containing the parts of the resource concerned which will be uploaded to the TEI Demonstrator. Note that the majority of these texts are already available via other websites; the Demonstrator will not attempt to replicate the functionality of these.