Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS

The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) is tackling one of the trickiest problems of scholarly text encoding. How can we provide robust, large-scale TEI publication services, while accommodating the detailed scholarly insight that makes TEI such a valuable tool for the digital humanities? What level of customization and variation can we support without compromising on interoperability, and what are the mechanisms by which we can achieve the optimal balance? And who needs variation anyway—what kinds of scholarly insight are at stake, or at risk?

TAPAS seeks to offer long-term TEI repository and publishing services, with special focus on supporting scholars who lack access to XML publishing infrastructure or expertise at their own institutions. Supported by a planning grant from the IMLS and now by a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant and an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant, the TAPAS service will make it possible for scholars to use TEI in their teaching and research without mastering the full suite of XML technologies. The service will also provide access to consulting, training, documentation, and community-developed tools. This talk will explore the conceptual and strategic challenges in developing TAPAS, and in particular the problem of how to harmonize—or transcend—divergent approaches to TEI encoding.