1. Origins of the TEI project

1.1 History and motivations

During the 1980s, part of the humanities and social sciences research community became aware of both the possibilities and the limitations of information technology. For example, in the case of linguists, the use of DTP made it easier to build up electronic text corpora, but in reality, the very wide variety of coding systems and equipment often represented an obstacle for research teams. This led to the idea of defining a text representation format that would be neutral with regard to equipment and computer systems, and at the same time sufficiently expressive to enable work on texts from a wide range of disciplines. The principles for defining such a format were laid down as early as November 1987, at a conference held at Vassar College (Poughkeepsie,...