Capturing Metadata
Metadata literally means data about data. When preparing digital surrogates, the metadata is information about how documents were prepared, what materials they are made of, how those materials are represented (for example, a photograph of a physical piece of paper, or the piece of paper itself). The metadata also includes information about who prepared the documents, where they are stored, and who is involved in transcribing and representing them in the current document. The people who were involved in producing and reproducing the documents all had a hand in its transmission, and their identities and roles are also part of a document’s metadata.
The TEI Header (or the TEI document encoding completed in the <teiHeader> element) is designed to store metadata, and it can be very complex when representing a digital surrogate, because it should contain information about the document being represented and whatever is known of its provenance (or origins), as well as information about the person encoding it now and the date and time of its encoding as a TEI document. In the TEI Header Exercise each team of learners will gain some experience with thinking about how to encode metadata following the TEI Header Section of the TEI Guidelines as a standard for sustainable practice and our sample <teiHeader> element below.
Download "RAW" XML containing the teiHeader template here.
Quick Link: list of identified team member IDs.
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The Digital Repository Manager at Northeastern University Libraries, @sarahjeansweeney on GitHub, has a repository called TEI2MODS ➡️ sample records with a variety of examples.
tei_full_metadata.xmlbeing one of the more filled out samples. -
TEI council member and University of Pittsburgh Associate English professor, @ebeshero on GitHub, displays the metadata for each document in the Digital Mitford archive alongside the encoded transcription. See a sample letter rendering here and the underlying XML (with
<teiHeader>element) here.
The lessons and exercises constructed for this course incorporate materials from Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar's Digital Humanities courses, the Digital Mitford Coding School, the Text Encoding Initiative's learning resources, GitHub Guides, and the GitHub Help resources. This repository is public-facing, therefore, the lessons and exercises herein are licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.