ABSTRACT
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the foremost of the efforts to determine guidelines for encoding electronic texts in the humanities, was funded jointly by the European Union and the Mellon Foundation. The most visible sign of the TEI is the massive volumes of guidelines, published in 1994. The success of the TEI can in part be attributed to the prominence of its advocates, through the network of organisations and scholars which created it, and in part to the adequacy of its encoding design. The TEI is very strong on descriptions of texts as logically structured units; it copes much less surely with texts as physical phenomena, made up of bound pages or appearing as black marks on white paper. If an electronic edition of the Canterbury Tales, or Samuel Johnson, or Ezra Pound, is to be worthwhile, it must reproduce much more than just a single manuscript or state of the text.
