TEI Processing Model Toolbox: Power To The Editor

Crossing the divide between encoded XML sources and tangible, published digital edition has always been a weak spot for TEI community. Recent efforts of the TEI Simple project aimed to bridge that gap with TEI Processing Model idea. TEI Processing Model Toolbox, an eXist-db based application brings the promises of TEI Simple (Rahtz et al., 2015) to life with its implementation of the processing model enhanced with an app generator, allowing to create standalone digital editions out of the box.

Publishing an edition from TEI sources so far involved tedious work on complex stylesheets and significant effort in building an application on top of it. Using the TEI Processing Model, customising the appearance of the text is all done in TEI ODD by mapping each TEI element to a limited set of well-defined behaviour functions, e.g. “paragraph” or “heading”. The TEI Processing Model specification includes a standard mapping, which can be tweaked by overwriting selected elements. Rendition styles are transparently translated into different output media types like HTML, XSL-FO, LaTeX, or ePUB. This approach easily saves thousands of lines of code for media specific stylesheets. The power of the eXist-db database and the application framework on the other hand take care of all the other core features like browsing, search and navigation.

The proposed workshop intends to introduce the concepts of the TEI Processing Model and provide a tutorial on how to use TEI Processing Model Toolbox (Meier et al, 2016) app to experiment and try out various ODDs containing processing model instructions, upload users’ own files and create a custom ODD, and, finally, generate their own, standalone edition using the App Generator. As an inspiration it will also present examples of real apps built with App Generator and other systems employing TEI Processing Model.

It is hoped that exposure to the concepts and technologies presented during the workshop will give its participants a point of exit in the task of publishing their own research data. The subject of the workshop is also strongly tied to a short paper on practical lessons from applying the TEI Processing Model that will be presented later at the DH2016, giving interested participants the opportunity to be introduced to the concept in a much more detailed manner than is possible during brief conference talk.