Practical Considerations in the Use of TEI Headers in a Large Corpus

Abstract

Many aspects of the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) are applicable to corpora and text collections, and to the texts that these contain. As the first large corpus developed using mark-up conforming to the guidelines, the British National Corpus (BNC) is a test-bed for many TEI-developed mechanisms. This is particularly true in the case of the TEI header, which has three intended applications — to describe a corpus, to describe an individual text, and as a free-standing bibliographic record — all of them used by the BNC. This paper describes the application of the TEI header to the BNC. It is intended that this information should, through a description of experience on a practical project, serve as a guide for those wishing to use TEI headers in the documentation and management of other corpora and collections of texts.

Dominic Dunlop is project manager for the British National Corpus at Oxford University Computing Services. Prior to assuming this position, he worked in a variety of positions related to development and support of the UNIX operating system, and was active in the POSIX initiative for the standardization of UNIX.