TEI in a crystal ball

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an organization, a research community, and a markup language. Looking back into the history of these three TEIs, this article tries to describe what has been achieved and what its future challenges will be. The historical analysis is based on a closer look at the development of the TEI-L and topics covered by the Guidelines. A final section outlines possible roles of the TEI as an infrastructure for digital libraries and disciplinary virtual environments. ................................................................................................................................................................................. The title of my talk was inspired by a remark by David Birnbaum 17 years ago on the TEI-L discussion list: ‘I have no crystal ball, but 16-bit coding looks very much like the future for multilingual texts’. Even without a crystal ball he was right and I cannot even hope to foresee into the future as well as he did. Looking into a crystal ball to see the future is much easier if you know your customer. Doing this for an institution is much more difficult and requires research into the past: how was the TEI conceived when it was first developed and what it has become over the past 20 years? What is missing from the Guidelines and what is superfluous? Are there large trends in the digital world sweeping TEI along with it; are there smaller trends in humanities computing? Or are there specific subjects that will assert the most influence on the TEI in future? Talking about TEI in the future implies that we know what TEI is. Our answers to the aforementioned questions will be different for different aspects of TEI. Very obviously the three letters stand for a growing collection of tags, or rather the concepts behind these tags. As Elly Mylonas and Allen Renear pointed out at the last birthday celebration at Brown University, the TEI has also become the synonym for a research community in the digital humanities (Mylonas and Renear, 1999). Last but not least, the TEI is the name of an international consortium with subscribers all over the world—one of the very few humanities organizations that successfully operates at that scale. In this article, I will examine the development of the TEI from these perspectives and attempt to extrapolate some future trends. 1 The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as an Organization The TEI began as a project financed by granting agencies. After the grants that made the initial stage of TEI development possible were exhausted, those involved created the Consortium. Financed by its members, the legal, financial, and technical framework of the Consortium affords an important element guaranteeing the sustainability of the TEI. As with other ‘standards’ in the Internet age, these have to be developed to accommodate new factors in their environment, new user wishes, and new technical possibilities. They have to be promoted to the ever increasing number of people working on the web and the digital world in general; and they have to be supported to close the gap between the technical definition, which is general, terse, and often difficult to access, and the user who wants to solve a special problem and to avoid a steep learning curve. In this context, standards are not everlasting but allow temporal stability and a Correspondence: Fotis Jannidis, Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Universität Würzburg, Am