Introduction

Abstract

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard, 1994), known familiarly as TEI P3 (i.e., “TEI Proposal number 3”) or just “the Guidelines”, appeared in May, 1994. The Guidelines are the result of over six years’ work by dozens of scholars from all over the world who were involved in TEI working groups, providing their conclusions concerning the optimal way to consistently and comprehensively encode a vast range of text types and features. As such, TEI P3 represents a pioneer effort in an area where only occasional and isolated attempts had been made before, and will certainly serve as the primary basis for encoding texts in electronic form for the foreseeable future.

Nancy Ide is Associate Professor and chair of Computer Science at Vassar College, and Visiting Researcher at CNRS. She is president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and chair of the Steering Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative. Jean Véronis is Maître de Conférences in Computer Science at the Université de Provence and head of the Natural Language Processing Group of Laboratoire Parole et Langage.