Sarah Newhouse and Dana Dorman spoke to Archivists Being Awesome about Text Encoding in projects at the Historical Society of Penn.

1. Using Transcription and Text
Encoding in Digital Exhibits

2. “Closed for Business”
www.hsp.org/bankers-trust

3. • 320 primary source documents
• Biographies
• Contextual essays
• Teacher resources
Drupal 7 web site
Documents and biographies encoded in XML
following Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards

4. What did we encode?
• Structure (paragraphs, page breaks, additions
and deletions, etc.)
• Basic intellectual content (names and dates)
• Analytical content/pointers
(interpretive/subject tags and document
genres)

5. Sample encoding:

6. Process
• Selected & digitized documents
• Transcribed and encoded text in XML using
Oxygen XML Editor
• Proofread XML documents and added
interpretive encoding
• Worked with outside web developers to build site
• Uploaded documents to site
• Processing magic!
• Look for unexpected behavior / errors

7. The finished product:
www.hsp.org/bankers-trust

8. Lessons Learned
• Tech side of digital humanities can take a LOT
of time for those of us learning by doing.
• TEI community offers support for newbies.
• Assume that technology will change during
your project, and try to plan accordingly.
• Document your decisions and leave yourself
bread-crumbs.

9. Want to learn more about TEI?
• The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) consortium
www.tei-c.org
• TEI-L mailing list
(available through www.tei-c.org)
• Brown University’s Women Writers Project
Offers seminars, training materials, etc.
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/outreach/seminars/

10. Next up:
William Still Digital History Project
Questions? Contact:
Dana Dorman
Project Manager, Greenfield Digital Project & William Still Digital History Project
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
ddorman@hsp.org
Sarah Newhouse
Greenfield Project Assistant & Processing Archivist
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
snewhouse@hsp.org