ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolution of standardized data models in the humanities and social sciences. As in database design it is essential to define precisely the limitations of the model to which one is reducing the source. In explicitly rejecting that model of textual essence, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) attempted something rather more ambitious. There has long been a perception that the TEI is a prescriptive model, as indeed in some respects it is: it prescribes a number of very specific constraints for documents claiming to be TEI conformant, for example. The shape-shifting is a continuation and intensification of a principle adopted very early on and manifest in the conspicuously consultative manner by which the TEI Guidelines were originally constructed. The interdisciplinary nature of the TEI model is also reflected in the way the Guidelines themselves are organized and in the way that its formal definitions are intended to be used.
