Text Encoding Initiative

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium sponsored by three scholarly societies and hosted by groups at four universities. The TEI has published a sequence of guidelines specifying encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities and the social sciences. Since 1994, these guidelines have been a widely-used standard for text materials for performing online research and teaching. Backwards compatibility has been maintained, although that will probably change.

The scholarly societies sponsoring the TEI are the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. These three groups first organized the TEI in 1987 as a research effort funded exclusively by significant grants from many agencies.

Today, the TEI Consortium is a member-funded non-profit corporation hosted by the Research Technologies Service at the University of Oxford, the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University, the Department of Culture, Language, and Information Technology at the University of Bergen, and the Electronic Text Center and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.

The TEI currently maintains an extensive web site, which was the source for the information summarized in this entry.