Encoding Plan Handout
author: Julia Flanders; Syd Bauman
language: en-US

Guidelines for Encoding Project

The hands-on encoding project for this workshop is intended to give you an opportunity to practice all the different aspects of TEI markup and a few related skills. By the end of the workshop, you should have the following:

- a valid TEI file containing at least one short sample text, or an appropriate section of a longer text
- as part of the TEI file, a valid TEI header with some basic metadata about your file
- as part of the TEI file, some sample contextual information (a glossary, a bibliography, a personography, etc.)
- a working CSS stylesheet with some style information to display your encoded file
- optionally, a customized TEI schema against which your file is valid

At the end of the workshop, you'll have the opportunity to share your work with the other participants as a case study. As you work on your project, bear in mind the following questions that will come up in the discussion:

- What is the intended audience?
- What are the significant features of your text? Which of these will you represent or omit in the encoding, and why?
- What factors determine the level of detail in your encoding? What additional features would you include if this were a real funded project?
- What schema customizations could help make your encoding tighter or more consistent? Which of these were you able to implement in your sample customization?
- What kinds of things (display, analysis, etc.) would you want to do in publishing this data?
- How might this data be reused in the future (by other projects, by you for additional research)?
- Could any of the encoding be automated, if you had to encode a very large number of similar texts?