Conference Agenda

In 2016, the Women Writers Project (WWP) began a new research project on the multivalent ways that early women writers engaged with literate culture, at the center of which were systemic enhancements to a longstanding TEI corpus. The WWP’s flagship publication, Women Writers Online (WWO), collects approximately 450 works from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a watershed period in which women’s participation in the authorship and consumption of texts expanded dramatically. With generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we used WWO’s TEI encoding to jumpstart the creation of a standalone bibliography containing and linking to all the works referenced in WWO. This bibliography currently includes 3,431 book-level entries; 942 entries that are parts of larger works, such as individual essays or poems; and 126 simple bibliographic entries (e.g. books of the Bible). The bibliography identifies the genre of each work and the gender of the author, where known. We also expanded WWO’s custom TEI markup in order to say more about “intertextual gestures”—or WWO authors’ engagement with other works—which include not only named titles and quotations but also textual remix, adaptation, and parody. By the end of the grant period, we had identified 11,787 quotations, 5,692 titles, 4,825 biblical references, and 1,968 other bibliographic references, linking the individual instances within the WWO texts to the relevant bibliography entries.

Now, the WWP has published “Women Writers: Intertextual Networks” (https://wwp.northeastern.edu/intertextual-networks), a web interface built on these two sources of rich TEI data: the bibliography and WWO’s newly refined intertextual gestures. In this paper we will discuss the challenge of turning dense, textually-embedded data into an interface. Though the encoded texts themselves can stand alone as complete documents, we built Intertextual Networks with a focus on connective tissue, using faceting and linkages to invite curiosity about how authors and works are in conversation with each other. As the numbers above suggest, this project attempts to enable investigations at scale, but we have also sought to draw out the local, even individual, ways that our writers engaged with other texts and authors. Thus, the interface includes visualizations that show overall patterns of usage (for example, the kinds of intertextual gestures employed by each author), but it also allows the reader to view the complete text of each gesture, reading through quotations, named titles, citations, and so on in full, with filtering and faceting to support exploration of this language.

An important challenge for this project has been to build an interface that can address the multidirectional levels of textual imbrication at stake, allowing researchers to examine patterns among both referenced and referencing texts. This paper will share some key insights for TEI projects seeking to undertake similar markup expansion and interface development initiatives. We will discuss strategies for modeling, enabling discovery, and revealing complex layers of textual data and textuality among not only a primary corpus but also a related collection of texts.

In Spring 2022, the co-authors collaborated in a TEI Technical Council subgroup to introduce a long-awaited <gender> element and attribute. In the process, we wrote new language for the TEI Guidelines on how to approach these concepts. As we submit this abstract, our proposed changes are under review by the Council for introduction in the next release of the TEI Guidelines, slated for October 2022. We wish to discuss this work with the TEI community to validate and address

* the history of the Guidelines' representation of these concepts,

* applications of the new encoding, and

* the extent to which the new specifications preserve backwards compatibility.

We must recognize as digital humanists and textual scholars that coding sex and gender as true "data" from texts significantly risks categorical determinism and normative cultural bias (Sedgwick 1990, 27+). Nevertheless, we believe that the TEI community is well prepared to encounter these risks with diligent study and expertise on the cultures that produce the textual objects being encoded, in that TEI projects are theoretical in their deliberate efforts to model document data (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012). We seek to encourage TEI-driven research on sex and gender by enhancing the Guidelines' expressiveness in these areas. Our revision of the Guidelines therefore provides examples but resists endorsing any single particular standard for specifying values for sex or gender. We recommend that projects encoding sex and/or gender explicitly state the theoretical groundwork for their ontological modeling, such that the encoding articulates a context-appropriate, informed, and thoughtful epistemology.

Gayle Rubin's influential theory of "sex/gender systems" informs some of our new language in the Guidelines “Names and Dates” chapter (Rubin 1975). While updating existing examples for encoding sex and introducing related examples for encoding gender, we mention the “sex/gender systems” concept to suggest that sex and gender may be related, such that a culture's perspective on biological sex gives rise to its notions of gender identity. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves confronting the Guidelines' prioritization of personhood in discussion of sex, likely stemming from the conflation of sex and gender in the current version of the Guidelines. In revising the technical specifications describing sex, we introduced the term "organism" to broaden the application of sex encoding. We leave it to our community to investigate the fluid concepts of gender and sex in their textual manifestations of personhood and biological life.

Encoding of cultural categories, when unquestioned, can entrench biases and do harm, a risk we must face in digital humanities generally. Yet we seek to make the TEI more expressive and adaptable for projects that complicate, question, and theorize sex and gender constructions. We look forward to working with the TEI community, in hopes of continued revisions, examples, and theoretical document data modeling of sex and gender for future projects. In particular, we are eager to learn more from project customizations that “queer” the TEI and theorize about sexed and gendered cultural constructions, and we hope for a lively discussion at the TEI conference and beyond.

Who can best define the interests and needs of a community? The members of the community itself.

“Communicating the Text Encoding Initiative to a Multilingual User Community” is a research project financed by the A. Mellon Foundation in which scholars from North and South America are generating linguistic, cultural, didactic and situated educational materials to improve the XML-TEI encoding, editing and publication of Spanish texts.

As part of the project activities, we prepared a bilingual survey (Spanish-English) aimed at inquiring t who uses or has used XML-TEI practices, and where and how they have been applied to Spanish humanistic texts. Bearing in mind that many digital scholarly edition projects of Spanish texts are carried out in Spanish-speaking and Anglophone institutions, we did not focus on a geographical survey, but on the use of XML at a global level. The survey ran between February and April 2022. It is an anonymous survey and consists of 22 questions. It received 104 responses, 77 in Spanish and 28 in English.

Some of the data that we will discuss in this short presentation aims at illustrating the significant differences regarding the organization of projects, collaboration, financing and use of TEI in master's and doctoral research. In broad terms, the survey allowed us to better understand not only the Spanish-speaking community that uses XML-TEI, but also to think of strategies that can contribute with more inclusive practices for scholars from less represented countries and in less favorable contexts inside the global TEI community. Last but not least, we believe the survey will be useful for designing actions that can support a wider range of modes of interaction and collaboration inside the global TEI community.