Hi Council,
This morning I received a curious message addressed to a pretty rarely-used
e-mail address: council(a)tei-c.org with subject line: "About TEI projects".
I wonder if any of us have met the sender, Lebron Letchev? He seems to be
someone with a technical background, very keen on databases, and having
some difficulty, possibly some irritation about understanding what TEI is
for.
I momentarily forgot that only the Council chair receives mail at this
address (possibly previous Council chairs too). He sounds a little like a
crank, so I hesitated to reply to his message, but I found my way to a
reply that I hope is useful, and potentially helpful when we meet others
who don't understand why we TEI. I'm forwarding his message and my reply as
a curiosity.
Cheers,
Elisa
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar(a)gmail.com>
Date: Sat, May 9, 2026 at 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: About TEI projects
To: LEBRON LETCHEV <lebronletchev(a)gmail.com>
Dear Lebron (if I may),
The TEI is not a product for sale, so I do not understand your question
about purchasing a "package". The TEI certainly does provide guidance on
document data modeling for cultural heritage projects, and it is supported
by a number of databases that handle XML structures, such as the free and
open source eXist-dB.
TEI XML may be stored and indexed and retrieved in a database, but it is
not restricted to this use. Using TEI is simply a decision, and perhaps it
is called for when information is more complex than you can describe in
columns. Why would people ever turn to the TEI to represent data? Let me
present you an example application of the TEI that does not involve
database software and that expresses its TEI semantics directly in the web
browser.
The project involves study of an ancient manuscript written in a language
that is unknown today:
* The manuscript contains images of plants and animals and people that can
be categorized, studied, conjectured about. It also contains glyphs that
people have been attempting to study.
* The organization of the pages in the manuscript is a little unusual: We
can see a regular pattern of how the vellum was folded and cut and
organized into bundles, but in some places, leaves have been torn out, and
there is some damage on some of the surfaces.
* There is evidence of multiple "hands" writing on the page surfaces.
* The page surfaces themselves contain material evidence of how the
manuscript was made and how it was bound and shared over time among
collectors. Scholars are attempting to trace where it originated.
A feature of TEI XML for scholars is that it is designed to express what is
known and recognized, and also to identify precisely what is unknown. It is
exemplary and powerful for organizing metadata (data about the data) in
either "stand-off" or "inline" ways as helpful: with annotations running
within the markup structures pinned to external reference structures. Much
of this will feel like working with a database, but it is not restricted to
database technologies. The case we describe here is one that has lately
involved migration:
* from one format of ASCII representation in a nonstandard text format used
by the manuscript researchers, and
* into the TEI, for the purpose of organizing the information, representing
the document, and its metadata in a standard way that is recognized and
workable for scholars around the world.
The TEI XML data of this project can be itself stored and processed with a
database, but it is also a standalone document in its own right, expressing
and recording information in a way that is both human- and
machine-readable.
The scholar working on transforming this to TEI was also thinking of how to
represent and share the work. She indicated in a project meeting that she
did not want to lose the meaningful encoding of the TEI in publishing it on
a website, because HTML elements are too simply about representation than
about meaning. When she indicated this, we realized that she would best
work with CETEIcean (https://teic.github.io/CETEIcean/) a JavaScript
library developed to express the TEI directly in the web browser without
losing semantics, and instead, enhancing them with CSS and interactive JS
where this would be advantageous.
Similar to our scholar's recognition that HTML would be too simple and
"lossy", the grid structure of a database may also oversimplify patterns of
data that can be intricately "deep" in places and entirely blank in others.
Databases can be useful in retrieving TEI data and indexing it, and
specialized databases exist that help with creating search engines that
support websites, but databases are not the only way to work with TEI data.
Many of us in the TEI community like to work with databases as you do, but
the TEI is not itself bound to database software. TEI is specifically
designed to outlast changes in software and technologies and is simply an
interchange format for representing document data.
I hope this helps you to understand the TEI and why people choose to use it
in projects.
All best,
Elisa
--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
TEI Technical Council Chair
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital
Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie,
The Behrend College
Development site: https://newtfire.org
On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 6:06 AM LEBRON LETCHEV <lebronletchev(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to know exactly what is the difference between encoding a text
> (title, author, year, publisher, and so on) and create a database with
> heads like title, author, year, publisher, and so on. According to link
> https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/encoding-texts-tei-1#a-minimal-…,
> in "A Minimal TEI Document", the body contains the similar text that a
> database memo would contain and the "encoding" title, name, publishing
> could be arranged into a database in separated columns.
>
> I work with academic projects since 2001, I have some interesting projects
> online, now all of them under "recosntruction" after cloudflare. Sincerely
> speaking I love databases. I would like to know why must I buy your package
> instead to use a free database with programming evidently.
>
> In short, its essential a database behind the scene, all data are storage
> in a database. Html/CSS are used in the front end, so where stay the TEI?
>
> Best regards
>
> LL
>
Dear Council,
Most of us have now responded to Torsten's general calendar poll regarding
your availability in May and June. That poll at this late moment indicates
that Wednesday dates are best for most of the group, for 90-minute meetings
to begin at *9am PDT | noon EDT | 5pm BST | 6pm CEST*. We'll proceed to
meet on:
* *Wednesday May 6 *(in two days), for a meeting on P5
* *Wednesday May 20* for a meeting on P6.
I'll post these on our Google Calendar and we'll circulate the agendas on
Slack. The Zoom link will be the same as usual:
-
https://psu.zoom.us/j/98850059066?pwd=UzhBL2NFc1lweWYzS2xZd2dqYVZpdz09
-
Meeting ID: 988 5005 9066
-
Password: tei
Thanks, everyone!
Elisa
--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
TEI Technical Council Chair
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital
Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie,
The Behrend College
Development site: https://newtfire.org
