Session 7

Data modelling: editions

Author

Elena Spadini

Published

27 October 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Spadini Taught by Elena Spadini.

In this session

  • What is scholarly editing?
  • Discussion of (Sahle 2017)
  • TEI: the Text Encoding Initiative as a data model for text

What is scholarly editing?

  • The edition as a representation of a work, not a copy of it
  • Diplomatic, critical, genetic, documentary — what each foregrounds
  • Sahle’s wheel: text as document, as visual object, as linguistic sign, as work, as version
  • What “digital” changes: not the medium, but what the edition can be for

TEI

  • TEI as a customisable XML vocabulary and as a community
  • The header: an edition’s metadata is part of the edition
  • Core encoding: structure, persons, places, dates, editorial intervention
  • <choice>, <orig>, <reg>, <del>, <add> — encoding uncertainty and change
  • Customisation with ODD, and why every project ends up with its own subset

Connecting back

Look at the models you built in Session 4. TEI is a data model too — it just happens to be embedded in the text rather than held alongside it. What does that placement make easy, and what does it make hard?

TipIn parallel in the Lab

The DH Lab does TEI hands-on the same week, as a form of data publication.

Reading for Session 8

Weingart, Scott. 2011. “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (1). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/demystifying-networks-by-scott-weingart/

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References

Sahle, Patrick. 2017. ‘What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?’ In Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo. Digital Humanities Series. Open Book Publishers. http://books.openedition.org/obp/3397.