Session 7

Scholarly editing as a form of data publication

Author

Elena Spadini

Published

27 October 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Spadini Taught by Elena Spadini.

In this session

TEI, hands-on. The Intro covers what a scholarly edition is; here you encode one.

Setting up

  • An XML editor: VSCodium with the XML extension, or Oxygen (the university has licences)
  • Validation against a schema, and why the editor complains before you do
  • The TEI Guidelines — how to navigate a document that large

Encoding, step by step

Working on a short source — bring your own if you have one:

  1. The skeleton. <TEI>, <teiHeader>, <text>, <body>
  2. The header. <fileDesc>, <sourceDesc>, <publicationStmt> — the edition’s metadata is part of the edition
  3. Structure. <div>, <p>, <lb/>, <pb/>
  4. Named entities. <persName>, <placeName>, <orgName>, <date> — and @ref pointing to an authority file, which is where this connects back to Sessions 5 and 6
  5. Editorial intervention. <choice>, <orig>/<reg>, <abbr>/<expan>, <sic>/<corr>
  6. The document itself. <del>, <add>, <unclear>, <gap> — encoding what you cannot read is as important as encoding what you can

From encoding to publication

The reason this session sits in the Lab and not only in the Intro:

  • XML in, HTML out: transformation with XSLT, or with a publication framework
  • TEI Publisher, edition Visualization Technology, and static approaches
  • Where the images come from: IIIF, from last week’s session
  • Putting the encoded text in a repository, and what a citable edition needs

Exercise

Encode one page of a source, validate it, transform it to HTML, and publish it. Then hand your file to a neighbour and have them tell you what your encoding claims that you did not intend to claim.

TipIn parallel in the Intro

Data modelling: editions, and what a scholarly digital edition is

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