ABSTRACT
Marking the Text marks an area of study that dominates much of the interesting debate and conversation now occurring in humanities scholarship. The important practical tool implements the theory of text summarised by Allen in his theses and that he went on to describe in this way: this account of text is rich in explanatory and predictive power, implied by our modal intuitions about cultural artifacts and in guiding the development of tools and resources. In the field of humanities computing the idea of text has been dominated by conceptions practically realised in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) implementation of Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) mark-up. TEI and SGML mark-up, therefore, while reasonably adequate vehicles for expository and informational texts come up far short of rendering the features of poetic texts that are of greatest interest to those who read and use those texts.
