ABSTRACT
Collaboration, literally a shared work, is always understood to carry with it some kind of sacrifice, a trade-off between autonomy and synergy. What makes collaboration between projects in the digital humanities particularly interesting, and particularly challenging, is the way that these different frames of expectation intersect. Digital humanities projects take place, strikingly, in a universe constrained by a set of technical norms that govern the informational and operational behavior of the digital environment. A markup language is a method of digital representation through which one can create highly complex models of textual artifacts. Debates about how to balance these competing concerns in the markup community, and particularly in the community of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), are lively and sustained. The TEI encoding language is not a single, unitary thing: it is a vast landscape of possibility that covers domains as remote as manuscript description, dictionaries, drama, oral history, and linguistic corpora.
