Library Guides: Digital Humanities: Textual Analysis and Digital Texts

Text Encoding and Markup

Text encoding and markup in DH is the process of creating structures and annotations to textual data (rather than numerical data) so that it is easily processed and analyzed by computers.

Text encoding ensures that non-western/Latin script can be represented in digital texts (such as Arabic, hieroglyphs, Zapotec, etc.), thus allowing for easy and equal accessibility for researchers around the world.

Text Markup uses tags or codes to define the format and the presentation of the text. You can think of text markup up as the ordering and adornment of the encoded text.

Unicode
"An information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems." This is the most widely used text encoding standard in DH.
XML
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language). It's more of a format than a program. More specifically, it's an "application programming interface."
HTML
Stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language." This is the most widely used markup language in DH. Similar to XML but the main difference is that XML can store and transfer data while HTML displays the data and structures the webpage.
TEI
Stands for Text Encoding Initiative. It's a markup language that was specifically designed for historical texts, and is therefore abundant in tags used for deep, scholarly analysis.

Digital Text Collections

Digital textual collections and archives are sometimes (but not always) made available for free online. They can contain collections of books, manuscripts, newspapers, letters, etc. Some of their features include interactivity, navigability, and the option for reading in various formats (pdf, ebook, HTML text, etc.). The following are examples of free collections.

American Verse Project
"A collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project assembled an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry was converted into digital form and coded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) using the TEI Guidelines, with various forms of access."
Project Gutenberg
"A volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works." One of the earliest and most extensive digital collections.
Internet Archives
"A digital library that provides free access to collections of digitized materials like websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials."
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
"This collection of about 300 Middle English primary texts was assembled over more than two decades in order to provide a publicly accessible, cross-searchable sampling of Middle English from a widely diverse range of genres, times, and places. Selection was directed towards broad inclusiveness, neglecting neither major works nor minor, but has always been constrained by the need to keep the texts public, so that anyone could access them."